Police have opened a criminal case in connection with a brawl between members of pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi and the family of a Chechen government official over the official's wife's parked car, after a video of the fight went viral online.
Members of Nashi's StopKham movement, which targets drivers who park in places that block public transport or other parked cars, approached a woman outside the Yevropeisky shopping mall in Moscow who had double-parked, according to a video of the incident posted online by StopKham on Tuesday. The young men from StopKham told the woman that there is parking available inside the shopping center and ask her to move her car.
The woman, who was later identified in news reports as Madina Mingayeva, wife of deputy presidential plenipotentiary to Chechnya Tamerlan Mingayev, said she refused to move her car "on principle."
The young men say they will place a sticker roughly two feet in diameter on her windshield that reads, "I don't care about anyone, I park where I want," the traditional punishment meted out by the group for their targets. Mingayeva responds: "I'll stick [it] on your foreheads!"
She asks a StopKham member to erase a video recording of the argument being made, threatening that if he doesn't she will "rip his legs off."
"You're going to crawl around on two hands, you understand?" she says.
The video then cuts to a group of men arriving to the scene in a car. Soon after, a fistfight breaks out. News reports said Mingayeva's son Islam was among the group that came to the scene.
In an interview Thursday with Russian News Service radio, StopKham leader Ilya Fadeyev said the group was satisfied with the results of the incident, and implied no legal action would be taken.
"Our main goal was to show to the violator, shame her a little bit, and we'll stop there. We're not going to make a mountain out of a molehill," Fadeyev said.
Mingayev's boss, presidential plenipotentiary to Chechnya Bekkhan Taimaskhanov, told Interfax on Wednesday that the "issue was settled," without elaborating.
But on Thursday, Moscow police said a criminal investigation with a charge of hooliganism had been opened in connection with the fight, even while both sides say they did not file an official complaint, Interfax reported.
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