Moscow — Vladislav Bakalchuk, the estranged husband of Russia’s richest woman, was arrested and charged with murder Thursday, his lawyers said, after a deadly shootout at the Moscow office of Russia’s largest online retailer.

Two people were killed in a shooting Wednesday just a few blocks away from the Kremlin at the Wildberries office, as a dispute over the company’s future took a violent turn. Seven others were wounded, including police officers.

Vladislav and his wife Tatyana Bakalchuk, who filed for divorce in July, have been embroiled in a bitter public tussle since Wildberries announced plans to merge with outdoor advertising firm Russ Group in June.

Tatyana founded Wildberries, Russia’s answer to Amazon, in 2004, growing it from an online clothes reseller into a major marketplace for all kinds of goods.

Both parties blamed each other for Wednesday’s shooting.

Vladislav said he had arrived for a pre-arranged meeting and that it was staff at the office who fired the first shots. Tatyana said Vladislav and his colleagues had tried to seize the office and that there was no meeting scheduled.

Vladislav’s lawyers said he had been arrested and charged with murder and the attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, something they said was a “blatant and unprecedented violation” of their client’s rights.

The business dispute is centered around the merger that formed RVB, a new company with Robert Mirzoyan as CEO, which reduced Tatyana’s overall stake to around 65% in RVB from 99% in Wildberries.

Vladislav at the time said his wife was being “manipulated.” Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who stepped in to support Vladislav, called the merger an “asset grab.”

Tatyana has dismissed both of those allegations. The Kremlin said the merger had won President Vladimir Putin’s backing but he would not interfere with its progress.

In a tearful video message posted on Telegram early Thursday, Tatyana said: “Vladislav, what are you doing? How will you look into the eyes of your parents and our children? How could you bring the situation to such absurdity?”

The affair harks back to the 1990s, when deadly corporate turf battles were commonplace in Russia as huge swathes of property were redistributed after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Hezbollah is on the backfoot. The first sign of that was the absence of a public gathering – typically consisting of high-level party officials and supporters – to watch the militant group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah deliver a televised speech on Thursday.

The second sign was that Nasrallah’s address – his first since two waves of attacks detonated thousands of Hezbollah wireless devices earlier this week – was very possibly pre-recorded.

The leader of the powerful militant group has not delivered a speech in person since the start of Lebanon’s last all-out war with Israel in 2006. But he will often make a point of proving that his broadcasts are being carried by a live transmission. In his speech last month, for example, Nasrallah referenced two sonic booms caused by Israeli jets that had broken the sound barrier over Beirut. These happened in the seconds leading up to the start of his address.

Thursday’s speech was billed as a live transmission, but audiences were given reason to doubt around 20 minutes in, when Israel dropped flares over the Lebanese capital and sent windows shaking with a fresh wave of sonic booms. The roar reverberated throughout the city yet the Beirut-based militant leader neither flinched nor referenced the incident during his speech.

Israel’s fighter jets seemed intent to underscore the gains of Tuesday and Wednesday’s attacks on Hezbollah’s wireless devices: the group had been driven deeper underground.

“Without a doubt, we have suffered a major blow,” said Nasrallah in his speech on Thursday. “(It is) unprecedented in the history of the resistance in Lebanon at least, unprecedented in the history of Lebanon, and it may be unprecedented in the history of the conflict with the Israeli enemy across the entire region.”

Thousands of small explosions swept through the pockets and homes of Hezbollah members this week, targeting pagers on Tuesday, and then walkie-talkies on Wednesday; in all, the blasts killed at least 37, including some children, and injured nearly 3000. The attack, dystopian in its style and scale, blindsided the group that had opted for analogue technologies after forgoing cell phones to avoid Israeli infiltration.

Nasrallah vowed a “reckoning” but was scant on the details. The attack “will be met with a reckoning and fair punishment in ways that they expect and don’t expect,” he said.

But he continued with an unmistakably subdued tone. “However, because this battle was carried out by invisible faces, you must allow me to change my style,” he said.

“The reckoning will come. Its nature, scope, when and where … that’s something we will definitely keep to ourselves,” he added. “Within the tightest circle, even within ourselves, because we are in the most precise, sensitive and deeply significant part of the battle.”

Nasrallah tried to buoy the sober speech by extolling what he described as strategic gains of nearly a year of confrontations with Israeli forces on the Lebanon-Israel border. He also vowed to continue striking Israeli positions until Israel’s offensive in Gaza ends.

“We’ve been saying this for 11 months; we might be repeating ourselves, but this statement comes after these two major blows, after all these martyrs, wounds, and pain,” said Nasrallah. “I say clearly: no matter the sacrifices, consequences, or future possibilities, the resistance in Lebanon will not stop supporting Gaza.”

Responding to Israeli threats of creating a security buffer zone in Lebanon’s southern border area, Nasrallah struck a defiant tone, “welcoming” Israeli troops into the territory where he said Hezbollah militants would swiftly seize the opportunity to attack them.

Meanwhile in Lebanon, people are continuing to reel from the attacks that overwhelmed hospitals with wounded people, mostly with deep flesh wounds to the eyes and face.

Hezbollah will likely recede further into the shadows and regroup about their methods. During the 2006 war, the militant group’s Al-Manar television was on air for the duration of the 34-day conflict, despite Israel’s heavy-handed bombing campaign.

Live broadcasts have long been hailed by Hezbollah as a symbol of defiance against the long arm of Israeli spyware, and their ability to keep broadcasting against the odds has been a point of pride for the group – lending it a mythical quality among its Lebanese constituents and even some of its detractors.

But this week’s attacks on wireless devices punctured that aura. Hezbollah – which literally translates into Party of God – has been rattled, forced to contend with the new reality that it is more exposed than it has ever believed itself to be.

Karachi, Pakistan — Police in southern Pakistan shot dead a blasphemy suspect during an alleged shootout with armed men, officials said Thursday, the second such apparent extra-judicial killing in a week, drawing condemnation from human rights groups.

Police identified the slain man as Shah Nawaz, a doctor in Umerkot district, Sindh province, who had gone into hiding two days ago after being accused of insulting Islam’s prophet Mohammed and sharing blasphemous content on social media.

Local police chief Niaz Khoso said Nawaz was “killed just by chance” on Wednesday night when officers signaled two men riding on a motorcycle to stop in Mirpur Khas, a city in Sindh.

He said instead of stopping, the men opened fire and tried to flee, prompting police to return fire. One of the suspects fled on the motorcycle, while the other was killed, he said.

Khoso claimed it was only after the shootout that officers learned the slain man was the doctor being sought by them for the alleged blasphemy.

Videos circulating on social media showed local clerics throwing rose petals at police and praising officers for killing the blasphemy suspect. There was no immediate clarification from the Sindh government about the circumstances in which the suspect was killed.

The killing of Nawaz drew strong condemnation from the country’s independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, or HRCH, which said it was “gravely concerned by the alleged extrajudicial killing of two people accused of blasphemy.”

“This pattern of violence in cases of blasphemy, in which law enforcement personnel are allegedly involved, is an alarming trend,” it said in a statement. HRCP also asked the government to conduct an independent inquiry to ascertain who was responsible for Nawaz’s death and ensure those responsible for it were punished.

The killing of Nawaz in Mirpur Khas came a day after Islamists in a nearby city, Umerkot, staged a protest demanding his arrest. The mob also burned Nawaz’s clinic on Wednesday, officials said.

The latest killing comes a week after an officer opened fire inside a police station in the southwestern city of Quetta, fatally wounding Syed Khan, another suspect held on accusations of blasphemy. Khan was arrested Wednesday after officers rescued him from an enraged mob that claimed he had insulted Islam’s prophet.

But he was killed by a police officer, Mohammad Khurram, who was quickly arrested.

However, the tribe and the family of the slain man said they pardoned the officer, saying Khan hurt the sentiments of Muslims by insulting the prophet Mohammed.

Though killings of blasphemy suspects by mobs are common, the extra-judicial killings by police are rare in Pakistan, where accusations of blasphemy — sometimes even just rumors — often spark rioting and rampage by mobs that can escalate into killings.

Under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or Islamic religious figures can be sentenced to death — though authorities have yet to carry out a death sentence for blasphemy.

Pakistan has witnessed a surge in attacks on blasphemy suspects in recent years.

In June, a mob broke into a police station in the northwestern town of Madyan, snatched a detainee who was a tourist, and then killed him over allegations that he had desecrated Islam’s holy book.

Last year, a mob in Punjab province attacked churches and homes of Christians after claiming they saw a local Christian and his friend desecrating pages from a Quran. The attack in the district of Jaranwala drew nationwide condemnation, but Christians say the men linked to the violence are yet to be put on trial.