Russian security forces conducted a military-style operation to detain the powerful mayor of Dagestan’s regional capital on murder charges on Saturday, whisking him away in a helicopter to escape his private army of several hundred bodyguards, officials said.
Makhachkala Mayor Said Amirov is a legendary and colorful figure who has wielded vast clout in the Caspian Sea region, which has been destabilized by an Islamist insurgency that has spread across Russia’s North Caucasus after two separatist wars in Chechnya.
Amirov, 59, has served as mayor since 1998 and previously worked as deputy head of the provincial government.
He has survived 15 attempts on his life and lived in a bunker. Amirov has been in a wheelchair since an assassination attempt in 1993. In 1998, a car bomb aimed at him brought down scores of houses and killed 19 people, but he escaped unhurt.
The detention of Amirov could trigger a new wave of instability in Dagestan, a multi-ethnic, mostly Muslim province in southern Russia that lies east of the province of Chechnya. Local politics have been driven by rivalries between dozens of ethnic clans and business groups, and his detention could trigger a battle for the redistribution of power and wealth.
Dagestan has become the epicenter of the Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus, with daily shootings and bombings of police and other officials.
The suspects in April’s Boston Marathon bombings were ethnic Chechens who once lived in Dagestan, and one of them last year visited the province, where authorities are investigating if he had contact with Islamic militants.
Rasul Temirbekov, a spokesman for the Investigative Committee’s branch in Dagestan, said it took extreme security measures when they moved in to arrest Amirov.
Several streets leading to Amirov’s bunker had been blocked by armored vehicles, and he was flown away in a military helicopter to avoid a battle with his private army. The operation was conducted by officers dispatched from Moscow and other regions in an apparent bid to prevent a leak of information that would tip Amirov off.
Vladimir Markin, the spokesman for the federal Investigative Committee in Moscow, said that Amirov was detained along with more than 10 accomplices.
He said that Amirov is accused of staging the killing of a senior investigator with the local branch of the Investigative Committee in 2011. Markin said that the mayor was flown to Moscow.
Amirov’s nephew was detained in a parallel raid in the city of Kaspiisk.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the