Employees of the Main Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee of Russia (GSU ICR) for Moscow detained the alleged organizer of a youth organized crime group of natives of Tajikistan, specializing in beating people in public places. The attacks were carried out solely for advertising purposes: they filmed their actions, and posted the videos on social networks to demonstrate, as the investigation believes, “permissiveness and disregard for others.” For this dubious PR, hooligan bloggers can be sent to prisons for up to seven years.
The investigation of this large-scale criminal case, as sources close to the Main Investigative Committee of the ICR in Moscow explained to Kommersant, began with the registration of rather unusual episodes of hooliganism in different parts of the city. Small youth groups of visitors from Central Asia attacked and beat visitors to shopping malls for no apparent reason. Moreover, each episode, as the victims and witnesses of the attacks themselves explained to the investigators, was necessarily recorded by the attackers on video.
Five participants in the brawl that took place in early February in one of the supermarkets on Varshavskoye Shosse were detained. Their actions were qualified by the investigators of the ICR Department for the Southern Administrative District under Art. 213 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (hooliganism), however, the Chertanovsky District Court refused to take the violators into custody, taking into account the small gravity of the alleged crime. As a result, all of them were banned by a court decision only “certain actions”, which included the right to access the Internet.
Unreasonable attacks on people in public places continued, and criminal cases of hooliganism registered in different districts of Moscow were combined into one investigation.
The case was taken up by employees of the 1st department for the investigation of crimes against the person and public security of the capital’s Main Investigative Directorate of the TFR. Having tracked the social media accounts of the protesters who remained at large on the Varshavskoye Highway, the investigators of the Main Investigative Directorate found that the same group of young natives of Tajikistan bullied visitors to shopping centers. Looking through the reports on the activities of the group, the participants of the investigation found that after the meeting of the Chertanovsky District Court, the uploaded videos with brawls were supplemented by boastful posts of their participants about how they managed to safely avoid arrest.
In view of these circumstances, the attackers were already accused under the second part of the same Art. 213 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, which provides for imprisonment for up to seven years for group and pre-arranged hooliganism. The retraining allowed the GSU investigator to re-apply to the court for the arrest of the accused, and their activity on social networks, which violates the previously imposed prohibitions, became an additional argument in favor of electing all the defendants in the case a stricter measure of restraint.
As Kommersant was told in the Main Investigative Directorate of the ICR, the members of the ethnic group planned their attacks in advance. Having chosen a certain public place, hooligans came there and provoked conflict situations with visitors. Then, “using numerical and physical superiority, they attacked citizens and for no reason struck them with their hands and feet, causing pain and moral suffering.”
The defendants recorded their attacks on video and distributed them on social networks, thus demonstrating “permissiveness and disregard for others.”
Interestingly, the alleged leader of the hooligan bloggers was not among those arrested. This young man appeared on almost all the video recordings of the brawls at the disposal of the investigation, he was mentioned in his testimony by many witnesses and victims. Finally, the five arrested, according to the investigation, had known their leader for a long time, but they were all afraid to betray him. On Wednesday it was his turn.
To detain the alleged leader of the hooligans, the task force went to Khimki near Moscow at the place of his registration. According to the participants in the operation, Tillo Mamatnabiev, a 21-year-old student at the Moscow College of Innovative Technologies and Service, was already waiting for the visit of the security forces and was preparing to move to a pre-trial detention center. In the near future, the Presnensky District Court of Moscow will choose a measure of restraint for him.