BAKU, Azerbaijan — The editor of a magazine critical of Azerbaijan's government was shot and killed Wednesday in the lobby of his apartment building, police and colleagues said.

Seven shots were fired and four struck Elmar Huseinov, founder and editor of the opposition magazine Monitor, police at the scene in Baku, the capital, told journalists.

Tension between the government and the opposition in tightly controlled Azerbaijan has increased since the October 2003 election in which Ilham Aliev replaced his father, longtime leader Geidar Aliev, as president in a vote the opposition called fraudulent.

Several opposition leaders, including newspaper editors, have been sentenced to prison over unrest that followed the election.

Monitor has been published and sold privately since a decision forbidding the state printing and distribution company from selling it.

It was ordered closed twice. After the first order, in 1998, it continued publishing under a slighly different name. It shut after the second order, in 2002, but renewed publication after a change in media licensing legislation the same year.

Huseinov served six months in prison in 2001-2002 after a successful libel suit by the mayor of Baku.

Last November a court ordered his property confiscated to pay $20,000 fine connected with a 2003 suit by the representative of Azerbaijan's Nakhichevan enclave over an article titled "The Godfather."

Nakhichevan, which is on the Iranian border, lies entirely within the neighbouring state of Armenia. It has an area of 2,124 sq miles with a population of 333,200. The magazine article compared Nakhichevan residents to Sicilians. Huseinov did not have enough property to cover the fine.