Incident

Home page

Incident

Consul general: Police chief said one man had wanted to declare himself a crime boss during party

31 March 2016 14:11 (UTC +04:00)

Russian special police forces raided Wednesday an Azerbaijani businessman’s 50th birthday party held in a restaurant owned by Azerbaijanis in the city of Yekaterinburg, detaining up to a hundred Azerbaijanis, among whom he said were women and children as well.

Talking about details of the incident, the consul general said that around 1:00AM Wednesday he got a call from an unknown number.

“An Azerbaijani whom I did not know told me that a restaurant owned by Azerbaijanis in Yekaterinburg had been raided by police and all the people attending the party—including women and children—taken to the Directorate for Combating Organized Crime, where I rushed to right after along with two consuls. The department’s chief, Constantin Strogonov met us respectfully and told us about details of the incident. According to him, the women and children as well as the singers and meykhana masters from Baku were not detained during in the incident. The detainee might number around 200. The chief then showed me some photographs of the restaurant. The photographs showed cold weapons, drugs, etc. seized from the Azerbaijanis. Again, according to the chief, a man had been planning to declare himself a crime boss during that party. Under the guise of “birthday party”, that person was in fact holding a different party for himself. I thanked the chief for separating the women and children from them. Strogonov said the detainees will be released once they have been proven to be innocent of any crime,” said the consul general.

The consul general said all the detainees have already been released. “Soon I’ll will be informed if there were any Azerbaijanis among the detainees, because most of the detainees were the citizens of Russia,” he added.

Russian Interior Ministry’s General Directorate in the Ural Federal District said in a statement that they had received information of criminal bosses preparing to gather in one of the restaurants in Yekaterinburg. “Upon the receipt of information, an operational group was sent to the site. The women and children were not detained during in the incident. All the detainees were brought to the police station. The detainees will be released once they have been proven to be innocent of any crime. Investigation on the fact is ongoing,” said the statement.