MOSCOW, May 16. /TASS/. Member of the United Russia Party’s Supreme Council Yuri Kotler has been found dead in a downtown Moscow apartment, a police source said.

"Yuri Kotler has been found with a gunshot wound to the head in a flat on Moscow’s Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street. According to preliminary reports, he committed a suicide," the source said.

According to Senior Assistant to the Head of the Russian Investigative Committee’s Main Moscow Department Yulia Ivanova, investigators are working at the scene. Suicide is considered as the main cause of the man’s death, she added, without giving his name.

Kotler, 50, was a graduate of the Journalism Faculty at Moscow State University. In the early 1990s, he was a correspondent with Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency, the Time magazine and the New York Times. He later worked at the Russian Federal Agency for State Property Management, the Federal Commission of Securities Market and the Centre for Strategic Research. In May 2012, Kotler was elected to the United Russia’s Supreme Council. On February 19, he was approved to be a member of the United Russia’s Expert Council.