Crossbow killer of Russia’s ‘Sausage King’ jailed for 20 years
Alexander Mavridi, the mastermind behind the 2020 murder of Russian sausage tycoon Vladimir Margulov, has been jailed for 20 years, the Moscow Region prosecutor’s office announced on Monday. The defendant was found guilty of a plethora of crimes, including murder, unlawful imprisonment, extortion, possession of illegal weaponry, a prison break and money laundering.
Mavridi was under the radar of law enforcement back in November 2020, when Russian businessman Vladimir Margulov was murdered at his home near Moscow. It was established that, along with his closest associate Pasha Akhmedov, he had broken into the businessman’s house, killing him with a crossbow and leaving behind a woman who was with him at the time.
The crime was well planned, with the suspects watching the businessman and studying his daily routine before the attack. The woman the gang spared was left tied up but managed to swiftly escape and notify the police, who promptly caught the whole gang.
Apart from Akhmedov, Mavridi’s co-conspirators included five others, all of whom received lengthy jail terms. As an immediate accomplice to the murder, Akhmedov received 13 years in prison, while other members of the crime ring got between 11.5 and 6.5 years behind bars. The defendants may now challenge the sentence in a higher court, though it wasn’t immediately clear whether they intend to do so.
The investigation revealed, however, that the gang was originally created to commit another crime. During searches after the murder of Margulov, Russian law enforcement found a kidnapped man kept at one of the gang’s hideouts. The prisoner turned out to be Alexey Zavgorodniy, a lawyer who’d vanished around two years before the murder.
The gang kept the man hostage, handcuffed to his bed, pressing him into surrendering his assets. All in all, Mavridi’s gang managed to seize three apartments and a space at a parking lot in Moscow, worth at least 71 million rubles (some $850,000), from the lawyer before he was freed.
The gang leader managed to commit further crimes even in detention and attempted to simulate mental disorder after smuggling psychiatry manuals in through his legal team, according to the Investigative Committee. Apart from that, he managed to escape a detention center in the Moscow Region town of Istra in August 2021, alongside four other detainees. While four were captured shortly after the incident, Mavridi himself managed to evade the law for over a month.
