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Russia's 14 million Internet users are said to have greeted the news of Vardan Kushnir's demise with 'thinly veiled jubilation', after he had spent years stuffing their inboxes with advertisements for his American Language Center.

Moscow

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police said that he had been hit several times on the head with a heavy object and his apartment was ransacked. They ruled out revenge by an overburdened email user or a contract killing, explaining that he met two girls at a nightclub whom he invited back to his flat where they drugged him. Detectives speculated that he woke whilst his flat was subsequently being robbed and was then killed.

Russian media, however, has had a field day, with one describing the killing as 'An ultimate solution to the spam problem'.

At one stage Kushnir's spamming was so high profile that the Russian Government intervened, setting up an automatic phone dialler to call his office 1,000 times in a single morning. The country has no anti-spam laws.

Such is the extent of spam in Russia that emails from the .ru domain are routinely blocked by the country's Internet users and often by Web servers in other countries.