Police Raid Startles Hotel Staff, Guests

Armed police have raided the Baltschug-Kempinski, one of Moscow's most expensive hotels, bursting into a ground floor cafe and ordering all the guests and staff to the floor, an eyewitness said Tuesday.


After following a group of bandits in from the street, Moscow police and the OMON riot squad spent several hours searching the guests at the hotel Friday night, according to a hotel spokesman. The eyewitness, who declined to be identified, said patrons and staff in the hotel's Kafe Kranzler were forced to stay on the floor for half an hour.


The group of more than a dozen men, all bearing automatic weapons, were in street clothes and did not identify themselves until they left the hotel. Two of them wore masks.


"We were on the floor for a half hour, and we had no idea who these people were," said an eyewitness who was working at the cafe that night.


"We didn't know whether these were the authorities or whether two criminal groups were settling something among themselves."


Alexander Bobilyov, spokesman for the Baltschug, said OMON troops participated in the raid. But Vitaly Kiko, spokesman for the Moscow division of the OMON, said they did not. He referred questions to the Moscow police.


Moscow police spokesmen did not have any direct knowledge of the raid on the hotel, but one official, who did not provide his name, said it may have been part of a city-wide sweep dubbed "Arsenal."


"We are checking all of Moscow, private apartments, dormitories and hotels," the spokesman said.


"In general it's a check of places where criminal or bandits might hang out."


According to the eyewitness, the police arrested two people as a result of their search, but Bobilyov said some other patrons were found to be carrying weapons and were arrested as well. Bobilyov said police also went up one floor to the Baltschug Restaurant, but only asked four people for identification there.


The armed men came into the restaurant at about 8:25 p.m. Friday apparently while chasing two men in from the street, the witness said. The hotel's general director had just left the cafe himself, and waitresses had just poured champagne for a small group celebrating a wedding anniversary.


Though she said she was too scared to lift her head off the floor and look around, the cafe employee said the police appeared to search everyone's belongings for drugs and weapons and then asked them to show identification.


Events unfolded spontaneously and no one was warned in advance of the police actions.


Bobilyov said he understood the militia's right to enter the hotel, but wished they had been more polite. Some of the people who resisted dropping to the floor or turning over documents were put down on the floor by force.


"According to existing law, the police have the right to enter the hotel. But they could have been a little more proper about it," he said, adding, "it's not our place to comment on the activities of the police."


"They weren't very polite with the people who didn't want to get on the floor," the waitress said. "Basically, they forced them."


The eyewitness said that police never completely explained what they were doing, but in the end "They excused themselves in front of the guests before they left."


This is not the first time that a major Moscow hotel has been the scene of such disturbances.


In June 1994, riot police raced into the lobby of the Radisson-Slavjanskaya Hotel, automatic weapons drawn and at the ready, and arrested 10 alleged gangsters.


In May of this year, two armed men terrorized the Intourist Hotel just across the street from the Kremlin when they forced 50 people to the floor and robbed a jewelry store.


A policeman was shot and injured during the heist, and the robbers escaped.