MOSCOW: Russia on Thursday arrested the popular governor of a far eastern region on suspicion of ordering the killings of several businessmen 15 years ago, sparking a furious reaction from his party.
Sergei Furgal, the governor of the Khabarovsk region is suspected of being the "organiser of murders and the attempted murder of a number of entrepreneurs" in 2004 and 2005, the Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said in a statement.
Furgal stood for office representing the LDPR nationalist party and his arrest sparked a furious reaction from its leader. In televised comments in parliament, LDPR’s firebrand leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky said the party’s MPs could resign en masse in protest.
"If Furgal was allegedly mixed up in something, why did they wait 15 years?" he wrote on Twitter. Furgal was elected Khabarovsk’s regional governor in 2018. He secured 70 percent of the vote against the incumbent of the ruling United Russia in an embarrassing result for the party backing President Vladimir Putin.