Azerbaijani police have arrested one of the suspects in the recent attack on Ukraine’s lawmaker Mustafa Nayyem.
Ukrainian citizen, ethnic Chechen Magomed-Amin Saitov, 29, was arrested in Baku on May 5.
A group of five ethnic Chechens, including Saitov, attacked Nayyem on April 30, beating him up violently after the conflict they had on a road in the Kyiv’s center. Nayyem has been left with a broken jaw and a concussion.
Ukrainian police detained three of five attackers the same day, but another two managed to escape.
Saitov, who has allegedly broken Nayyem’s jaw, caught a flight to Baku three hours after the incident. Police are still looking for the fifth person, an unidentified BMW driver, who supposedly hasn’t taken part in the attack but escaped from the crime scene.
According to Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, Saitov crossed the border because at that time he hadn’t been yet identified by the law enforcers, but he was soon put on the wanted list.
Eugene Yenin, deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine said that Ukrainian prosecutors sent an arrest request to Azerbaijan on May 2, and will soon send an extradition request.
A profile of a Ukrainian citizen, ethnic Chechen Magomed-Amin Saitov, 29 on the Interior Ministry online wanted criminals base. Saitov, one of the five suspects of a gang-style attack on Ukraine’s lawmaker Mustafa Nayyem in Kyiv on April 30, caught a flight to Baku three hours after the incident, where he was arrested by Azerbaijani police on May 5. (Screenshot)
Incident
The attack took place late afternoon on April 30 when Nayyem was driving near central Kyiv’s Bessarabsky Market. When a BMW attempted to cut his car off on a road, Nayyem blocked the road and called the police in order to punish reckless driver.
A fight erupted when an escort car, a grey Mercedes, arrived. Mercedes driver and his friend, as well as two other men, all in their 20s, started beating Nayyem and then escaped from the crime scene before the police arrived.
Three were caught in Kyiv later the same day.
Nayeem, a lawmaker with the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, the biggest faction in Verkhovna Rada that has 133 seats, noted that he hadn’t presented himself as a parliamentarian during the fight and that he called the police as an ordinary citizen.
He asked Ukrainians not to stir controversy and described the incident as unconnected to politics.
Justice?
Ukrainian court on May 2 put three of Nayem’s attackers under the house arrest. Two of them, Ahmed Saitov, 19, and Umal Timberlatov, 22, are under the night house arrest until the next court session planned for June 30, while Russian citizen Magomed-Salih Saitov, 22, was put under the constant house arrest.
All three suspects in hooliganism refused to talk with the investigators without a lawyer and were demanding translation from Ukrainian to Russian during the court hearings.
Nayyem said on Facebook on May 3 that the restriction measures for three of his attackers were inadequate.
“Prosecutors have asked for the arrest in the pre-trial detention center for all three,” Nayyem wrote. “As two of the figurants of this case have already managed to escape from the justice.”
Nayyem’s lawyer Alina Samalets called this court decision dangerous for Nayyem, as according to her, the lawmaker has received messages with threats by email and social media.
“I will recommend my client to address the interior ministry with а request to provide security as well as to find those, sending the internet threats,” she told Hromadske.ua on May 2.
As for the fifth participant of the incident, all police knew about him was that he was the BMW driver and didn’t take an active part in the violent attack on Nayem.
He has escaped from the crime scene, driving the BMW. Andriy Krishchenko, the head of the National Police of Kyiv department, told Ukrainska Pravda news website on May 2 that police has been looking for the driver and a vehicle. As soon as both are found, the driver will be questioned.
Powerful Chechens
Magomed-Amin Saitov is a businessman with the strong ties to Chechen diaspora in Ukraine. Ukrainska Pravda reported on May 2 that Saitov was one of the founders of the BoomBox Promotions agency together with two other ethnic Chechens – his brother Musa Saitov and Magomed Donchayev.
Donchayev is also the aid of Danila Goncharov, the head of the Chechen Diaspora in Ukraine and the president of the International Union civic organization, allegedly financed by Ramzan Kadyrov’s Chechen government.
Chechen Diaspora, International Union, and BoomBox Promotions are registered in the same business center Milkom Palace on Dehtyarivska Street in Kyiv.
BoomBox Promotions represents several professional boxers on international arena. One of them, Russian boxer Hussein Baysangurov, who lives in Kyiv, is Goncharov’s nephew, according to Ukrainska Pravda.
