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The 3-year-old son of a regional Ukrainian lawmaker and businessman on December 1 died from a gunshot wound in central Kyiv,  RFE/RL reported, citing local media. 

The father, Kyiv regional council lawmaker Vycheslav Sobolyev, was with his family leaving a restaurant he owns when an unknown assailant approached the Range Rover he was driving and fired at the moving car.

The child was shot inside the vehicle and died in an ambulance en route to a hospital, police said.

A police search for the shooter is under way and the incident is being investigated as premeditated murder.

The company founded by Sobolyev, a businessman from the Donetsk region town of Yenakiyeve, the hometown of former President Viktor Yanukovych, has been investigated in relation to financing terrorism in eastern Ukraine, where an armed conflict with Moscow-backed separatists has existed since April 2014.

Citing court documents, investigative journalism group Slidstvo.info reported that the company and others to which Sobolyev had a direct relationship were allegedly used through January 2017 to legalize proceeds from business dealings in territories that Kyiv doesn’t control in the easternmost regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Another company mentioned in court documents is a supermarket chain that Sobolyev established in 1997 but then sold in 2007.

Sobolyev was elected to the Kyiv regional council in 2015 as part of the bloc of Petro Poroshenko, the former president who this year lost a reelection bid.

Sobolyev was previously the deputy head of state-run oil-and-gas conglomerate Naftogaz and a deputy mayor of Donetsk.