Regional governor in Russia arrested on murder charges
A provincial governor in Russia’s far east has been arrested
on charges of involvement in multiple murders, officials said Thursday.
Sergei Furgal, the governor of the Khabarovsk region along
the border with China, was arrested in Khabarovsk and was flown to Moscow.
The Investigative Committee, the nation’s top criminal
investigation agency, said Furgal is accused of involvement in the murders of
several businessmen in the region and nearby territories in 2004-2005.
Russian TV stations showed the video of Furgal’s arrest, in
which agents get the 50-year-old governor out of his car, search him and drive
him away.
The Investigative Committee said that four of Furgal’s
suspected accomplices were also arrested.
Before becoming the governor of the Khabarovsk region in
2018, Furgal served as a federal lawmaker on the ticket of the
Liberal-Democratic Party for a decade. In 2015-2016, he headed the public
health committee in the lower house of parliament.
Liberal-Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky
criticized law-enforcement agencies over the arrest, arguing that there was no
need to put Furgal in handcuffs.
The charges against Furgal date back to the period when he
worked as a businessman with interests ranging from imports of consumer goods
to timber and metals before launching his political career.
Following the 1991 Soviet collapse, Russia plunged into
violent turf battles between rival criminal clans for control over business
assets, and contract murders of businessmen were a regular occurrence during
the 1990s and the early 2000s.
Alexander Khinshtein, the head of the information and
communications committee in the lower house of parliament, said that Russian
law-enforcement agencies long had been aware of Furgal’s alleged criminal
connections.
“I’m not surprised about his arrest, I’m surprised that it
happened so late,” he tweeted.
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