3 City Cops Arrested After Deadly Beating

A drunken policeman, assisted by two colleagues, beat to death an Abkhaz man on a street in southeastern Moscow on Monday night, investigators said, the latest incident in a recent spate of police violence.

The three were arrested Monday night and were cooperating with investigators, the Investigative Committee said Tuesday in a statement.

Police Colonel Vladimir Domashev, commander of the regiment in which the alleged killer, Anver Ibragimov, 22, and his colleagues worked, was suspended on orders from police chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev.

The three patrolmen were fired, police spokesman Viktor Biryukov said.

Ibragimov and his colleagues, Alexei Chernikov and Viktor Kuznetsov, were all drunk and on duty, a police source told The Moscow Times, declining to be identified because the investigation was ongoing.

Ibragimov started the fight with Eduard Gurtskaya, 20, a native of Abkhazia, at about 11 p.m. on Zelenodolskaya Ulitsa in the Moscow’s Kuzminki district, the source said. Both Chernikov and Kuznetsov were also involved.

Gurtskaya, left badly beaten by the police, was carried to a neighborhood drugstore by his friend, a pharmacist at the drugstore told The Moscow Times.

Ambulance doctors called by the workers at the store tried to save Gurtskaya, but he died shortly thereafter, the pharmacist said on condition of anonymity. She described Kuzminki as a “seedy neighborhood where locals often fight with each other.”

Suspending Domashev — a high-profile and decorated officer — follows an order issued in May by Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev to hold commanding officers responsible for the behavior of their subordinates.

The decree followed several deadly incidents involving uniformed officers around Russia, most notably a supermarket shooting in southern Moscow.

The Moscow police source said Domashev was respected by his subordinates. But the head of the Moscow police’s independent trade union, Mikhail Pashkin, said the regiment that Domashev commanded experienced difficulties hiring patrolmen and brought in men from “literally everywhere.”

“I spoke to some of our union members, and their bosses told them to find new people even from the street,” Pashkin told The Moscow Times.

Domashev’s regiment was responsible for crowd control during protests and football matches.

Pashkin said the three were new recruits, serving only for one year, and could not be considered “policemen in full” because of the lack of training.

With crime committed by police officers up 16 percent this year, according to the Inferior Ministry’s statistics, holding commanders personally responsible for subordinates may become an effective measure, said Alexei Volkov, a deputy head of the State Duma’s Security Committee.

“Bosses will be much closer to their subordinates and will take their duties more seriously,” he said.

Andrei Babushkin, a leader of the Committee for Civil Rights, said police chief Kolokoltsev should focus on a radical reform of the city’s 90,000-plus police force. New York has roughly half as many police.

“Muscovites don’t need a lot of badly paid policeman. They need fewer, better-paid policemen,” he said.  

The attack poses a new challenge to Kolokoltsev, who has promised to rid the city’s force of criminal elements, calling them “drunk goons armed with guns.”

He was appointed to the post in September, replacing the long-serving Vladimir Pronin, who was fired by President Dmitry Medvedev.

The sacking was in response to Moscow police Major Denis Yevsukov’s drunken shooting rampage in a Moscow supermarket in April, which left three dead and another six wounded.

• Two decapitated bodies of law enforcement officials were found in Kabardino-Balkaria on Tuesday morning, Interfax reported.  

The bodies of a court marshal and a police investigator were found locked inside a Mercedes sedan parked on a street in the city of Cheget, just outside the regional capital of Nalchik.

Local police officials blamed Islamic militants for the murders.