A “Wagner fighter” with two machine guns was stopped in the Moscow region

In the suburbs, the police detained a man in whose car they found two machine guns. He called himself a mercenary from Wagner’s PMC, writes RBC, citing a police source and an interlocutor familiar with the materials of the criminal case.

In the Odintsovo district of the Moscow region, a traffic police officer stopped a Honda Pilot car to check documents. In her trunk, he found two AKMS assault rifles and 30 rounds of ammunition for them, sources said.

The detainee was from the Altai Territory. He said he signed a contract with Wagner PMC and participated in the war in Ukraine. According to one of the publication’s interlocutors, a representative of the management of the mercenary company arrived at the police station.

Despite this, criminal proceedings were initiated against the “Wagner fighter” under Art. 222 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The maximum penalty under this article is up to five years in prison.

RBC sent a request to the founder of the Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin, in which he indicated the name of the detainee – Akrom Khorshanbiev. Later, Prigozhin said that “they did not and do not have a person with the name of a prisoner with machine guns” and representatives of the Wagner PMC “have not yet arrived at the police.”

“I have just been informed that a citizen of Chorshanbiev has been detained in the Odintso region <…> We will try, so to speak, to get his face. Let’s run him through all our databases and figure out if he changed his name or something. But such a person, Chorshanbiev, we did not have and do not have, ”said Prigozhin.

If the man is indeed a Wagner fighter, this will not be the first criminal case against a mercenary who fought in Ukraine. In mid-September in Voronezh, Wagner fighter Andrei Pakhomov got into a fight with employees of the National Guard.

The incident took place at the Marton Hotel. Law enforcement officers came there on call after the “Wagnerian” made a scandal. The mercenary hit one Russian guard and repeatedly threatened and insulted both of them. During the search, 476 rounds of ammunition were found in Pakhomov’s car. Several criminal cases have been launched against him, including insulting a government official and using violence, Baza wrote.