Zaporozhye police partially solved one of the high-profile cases

investigation

On Tuesday, the head of the Zaporozhye regional police department, Viktor Olkhovsky, said that the investigation had identified the suspect in the murder of businessman Vladimir Malyar. It turned out to be Gagik Arustamyan, who lives in Zaporozhye. Those who ordered the murder have not yet been identified, but the police claim that the circle of people has already been identified. Suspect Arustamyan is wanted.

Vladimir Malyar was killed on March 15 in the center of Zaporozhye (Kommersant reported about the murder on March 16). According to the investigation, Mr. Malyar was involved in two high-profile murders in Dnepropetrovsk - the owner of the Charlie restaurant and coal trader Evgeniy Nikolaev and the former first deputy chief of the local regional police, Eduard Shevchenko. The Zaporozhye police believe that the reason for the murder could have been revenge for this (see Kommersant for March 17).

On June 27, Viktor Olkhovsky stated that the identity of the suspect in the murder of Vladimir Malyar had been established: “The collected evidence allowed us to officially put citizen Gagik Arustamyan on the wanted list.” According to investigators, the suspect recently lived in Zaporozhye. According to operational data, Gagik Arustamyan is known in criminal circles as a professional killer, but so far the investigation’s attempts to discover his participation in other contract killings have not yielded results.

Also, to date, the investigation does not have information about those who ordered the murder. Mr. Olkhovsky told a Kommersant correspondent that so far only a circle of persons have been identified who are of operational interest and in respect of whom evidence is being collected. The main investigative version of the murder of Vladimir Malyar is still considered to be a criminal showdown between Zaporozhye and Dnepropetrovsk “authorities.”

On June 10, a deputy of the Zaporozhye City Council, a member of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, Viktor Savkin, a previously convicted entrepreneur whose interests extended to the grain market, was killed in Yalta. On June 12, Yuri Sakvarelidze, a thief in law nicknamed Yura Gruzin, was shot dead in Zaporozhye. On June 20, local crime boss Pavel Kulyatov was killed in Energodar, Zaporozhye region.

At the same time, according to a reliable Kommersant source in law enforcement agencies, the death of Vladimir Malyar is the first in a chain of contract killings in Zaporozhye (Kommersant last reported this on June 21) related to the redistribution of influence in the territory of the Srednyaya gully. In particular, the investigation was able to establish that, as in the case of Yuri Sakvarelidze, who was shot dead in Zaporozhye on the 12th of this month (see issue dated June 14), Vladimir Malyar’s interests were focused on working with slag dumps.

VALENTIN Kommersant-TERLETSKY, Zaporozhye; MATVEY Kommersant-NIKITIN

The killer turned out to be a hitman