Four people died on Tuesday as a result of a fierce shootout that broke out in the north of the Khabarovsk Territory between poachers and local reindeer herders. The corpses of three men, 45, 41 and 35 years old, shot in the chest, were found 300 kilometers from Okhotsk, in the area of the Kulu River, near the border with the Magadan region and Yakutia. An investigative and operational group of the regional Internal Affairs Directorate and the Okhotsk District Prosecutor's Office that went to the area found, 15 kilometers from the scene of the tragedy, the corpse of a 32-year-old reindeer herder who died from gunshot wounds. Already in the first hours of the investigation, detectives were able to figure out the picture of the incident. According to preliminary data, three residents of Magadan decided to hunt deer that, as it later turned out, belonged to the Evenk collective farm “25 Years of October”. The poachers were well equipped; they arrived in a KamAZ truck and an all-terrain vehicle, and they brought with them three Buran snowmobiles. The hunters were armed with SKS carbines, had a radio station and a satellite phone. During the safari they managed to shoot two deer. According to investigators, local residents noticed the shots. What happened next, who attacked whom first, is still unclear. Be that as it may, the reindeer herders tracked down and shot the visitors, losing their comrade in the shootout. One of the participants in the massacre, a 34-year-old local reindeer herder who was guarding the herd, has already been identified. He managed to ski into the taiga before the arrival of the task force, and now a search for him has been organized.
