A prominent human rights worker who for a decade documented kidnappings and killings in Chechnya was snatched outside her home on Wednesday and found a few hours later near a highway, dead of gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

Natalya Estemirova, 50, had become a central source of information on abuses in Chechnya, whose separatist war has given way to a brutal counterinsurgency campaign.

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