Participants of riots in Makhachkala were tried for “obscene violence”

Courts in Dagestan began to publish the first rulings on cases of administrative offenses against participants in anti-Semitic riots at the Makhachkala airport. It follows from them that many participants of the mass action, during which the airport was actually under mob control for several hours, were placed under administrative arrest on charges of obscene language in a public place.

“Mediazona” studied the decisions of the Soviet District Court of Makhachkala. They are largely the same, one of the phrases repeated in the decisions of judge Khabib Hajiyev sounds like this: someone “expressed obscene language, behaved aggressively, did not react to comments to stop illegal actions, thereby disobeying the legal requirements of a police officer.”

Most of the administrative protocols on those participants of the action at the airport, to whom the Soviet court has already determined the punishment in the form of administrative arrest or compulsory labor, were drawn up based on actual domestic articles on petty hooliganism or disobedience to the police. However, the Dagestan courts received 82 protocols on violations of the rules for holding rallies. In particular, as Kavkaz.Realii writes, 54 administrative cases under this article were submitted to the Karabudakhkent district court.

The total number of persons in respect of whom administrative protocols have been drawn up is not reported. Judging by the available data, there are several dozen of them, perhaps more than 100.

• In the evening of October 29, several hundred people seized the Makhachkala airport, coming there with an anti-Semitic protest before the arrival of a flight from Tel Aviv. Those gathered protested against Israel and demanded the expulsion of Jews from the region. The crowd broke into the airport building and entered the airfield in search of passengers from Israel. As a result of clashes with the police and the Russian Guard, about 20 people were injured.
• Representatives of the Russian authorities, including President Vladimir Putin, claim that the riots were organized from abroad, in particular from Ukraine. The Ukrainian authorities deny this. Israel urged its citizens not to travel to the Russian republics of the North Caucasus, which the Russian Foreign Ministry considered an unfriendly gesture.
• The Investigative Committee of Dagestan initiated a criminal case under the article on the organization of mass riots. On November 3, investigative bodies claimed that they had established the identities of more than 20 suspects in active participation in anti-Semitic actions. At the same time, it was not reported whether any of them were detained and whether a measure of suppression was elected in their regard. Imams of a number of districts and representatives of rural communities of Dagestan called on “to show leniency and softness” and, if possible, not to punish the participants of the anti-Semitic riots at the Makhachkala airport. They called these events “the corresponding emotional reaction, committed in a state of affect.”