vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #602 / Crime watch / Reading article...

An Azeri businessman was killed in Vladivostok in what is alleged to be settling scores between the city’s ethnic criminal groups on January 11, while a night club guard was shot down and five club visitors were wounded in two other unrelated shooting incidents on January 12 and 14, police reports said.

Ramiz Verdiyev, an Azeri businessman involved in alcohol trade, was fatally injured when unidentified attackers from a passing car opened fierce fire at him and his bodyguard on Nevelskogo Street in Vladivostok. Verdiyev was leaving his Toyota Land Cruiser together with his driver and bodyguard when he was gunned down. He was rushed to the hospital where he later died, a statement from Vladivostok’s prosecutor’s office reported. The driver and bodyguard received critical wounds. Their conditions are reported as serious.

Police found four Makarov gun shells and over 20 Kalashnikov bullet casings at the scene of the crime. The attackers escaped in a car without license plates and police failed to catch them despite the specially launched operation.

A criminal investigation was opened into the murder. Several motives for the crime are being considered, the major one being a business-related conflict between local ethnic groups of Azeri origin.

In another closely-dated incident, on January 12, a security guard in Vladivostok’s night club ‘Fabula’ was killed by one of the patrons when he was trying to prevent a conflict, a statement from Primorye’s prosecutor’s office reported.

The investigators said that the guard, Anatoly Porodko, received a fatal injury when he was trying to avert a dispute between the club’s visitors. Two men were asked to leave the club but soon after their departure they returned, one man clutching a gun. At the entrance the guards tried to stop them and the armed man opened fire at the security guards. Porodko suffered a gun shot wound to the head and died a few hours after he was taken to the hospital, the statement said.

In this case the attacker was arrested on the spot and taken into custody. The city’s Leninsky prosecutor’s office has launched a criminal case.

Two days later, on Monday, another Vladivostok night club was sprayed with bullets amid a quarrel between the visitors. A man opened fire and wounded five people, but luckily no fatal injuries in this incident occurred. The shooter was detained by police and the case was started against him.

According to police statistics, some 30,000 crimes were committed in Vladivostok in 2007 with a clearance rate of only 27 percent. Head of the regional police Nikolai Vachayev at the meeting of police officers, Vladivostok Duma deputies and reporters on Tuesday openly admitted that, “police work ineffectively and Vladivostok is on the list of ten cities [in Russia] with the worst criminal statistics.” Vachayev named insufficient financing and the absence of a detention center to work with law breakers as the main reasons for the high crime rate. He did not cite corruption or lack of interest within police departments as possible additional reasons for the disappointing numbers in the fight against crime.