In 2001, a man was stabbed to death near a Lakeside Restaurant in Yekaterinberg, an urban centre in Russia’s Ural Mountains region.
In his dying breath, he whispered the name of his suspicious murderer to the police, local media claimed.
The man and his presumed murderer were Turkish-speaking Muslim people Azeris, who were Turkish-speaking Muslims whose families fled to Russia in the 1990s after the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Azeri region ruled by the ethnic Armenians.
However, it took Russian authorities 24 years to identify and detain the presumed suspect.
The two suspects died while being rounded up Friday. Russian prosecutors say one person suffered a “heart attack,” while the other suspect’s cause of death is “established.”
They also allegedly claimed that the suspect was part of a “criminal group” allegedly involved in other murders and was part of a sale of counterfeit alcohol that killed 44 people in 2021.
Prosecutors did not provide answers as to why the presumed “criminals” have been large for a long time.
Death caused a diplomatic storm. It could contribute to structural changes in the strategic South Caucasus region, the former stamping region of Russia, where Azerbaijan won Nagorno Karabakh in 2020 and where Turkiyer has regained centuries-old kraut.
Azerbaijan slams Russia’s “unacceptable violence”
So far, two Russian intelligence agents have been arrested in Azerbaijan, closing Kremlin-funded media outlets and cancellation of Moscow-sponsored “cultural events.”
Russian police and intelligence agents used “unacceptable violence” that killed two brothers, Ziyadin Safarov and Gusein Safarov, and seriously injured their parents, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.
One of the injured men reportedly reportedly began to smash his front door at dawn, scaring his children.
The officer “turned the house upside down and kept us on for an hour without asking anything,” Mohammed Safarov told MediaZnews’ website.
He said his older father was also beaten and electrocuted for hours, and claimed that both were required to “volunteer” to fight the Russian war in Ukraine.
Other Azeri media outlets have released photos of the bruises that the man claimed were caused by a Russian officer.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday in response to questions about Azerbaijan’s response. “We sincerely regret such a decision.”
He said, “We believe everything that’s going on (at Yekaterinburg) is related to law enforcement work, and we believe that this is not the reason for such a response, and that we shouldn’t.”
But Emil Mustafayev, a political analyst based in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, said the incident underscored the tensions of xenophobia in Russia.
“The murder of Azeris is a link to a gentle political chain where ethnic minorities are used as lightning,” he said. “This is not just a tragedy, it is a symptom of a deep illness in Russian society.”
Russia’s Azeridiaspora is at least 2 million, but they face discrimination, police brutality and hate attacks.
“The Kremlin has long been mastering the tricks. When domestic dissent is on the rise, we need to switch our attention to the ‘enemies’, like Ukrainians, Tajiks, Uzbex, or now, Azeris,” added Mustafeev.
He said the Kremlin used state propaganda, police brutality and the implicit approval of top officials to create an atmosphere of violence against immigrants “being deemed normal, inevitable.”
In the 1990s, Azeri immigrants almost monopolized fruit trade and minibus transport in urban areas of Russia.
Many still run countless shops selling vegetables and flowers.
“We are Boogie people. Police officers need to check the documents at all times and even after seeing our Russian passport, there is no need to excuse to harass us and call us by name,” the owner of Azeri, a flower shop near the main train station in Moscow, told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
Until the early 2000s, Azelis was Russia’s most hated ethnic minority until the arrival of labor migrants from Russia’s North Caucasus and former Soviet Central Asia, said Nikolai Mitrokin, a researcher at the University of Bremen in Germany.
He added that ultranationalists and skinheads who viewed Azelis as their main enemy have joined law enforcement.
“So, the cruelty in Yekaterinburg may have been caused by hatred decades ago,” Mitrokin told Al Jazeera.
A nervous tie
Other geopolitical factors contributed to Russia’s anti-Zelli sentiment.
In 2020, Azerbaijan ended a seemingly unresolved political impasse against Nagorno-Karabakh.
“The military aid from Torkier has definitely made it possible,” Alisher Ilkamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a London think tank, told Al Jazeera.
Baku purchased an advanced Turkish-made Bilactor drone that, along with trenches, tanks and trucks, can easily attack large groups of Armenian and separatist soldiers.
“Azeri Turkish alliance has emerged so that Baku can remove the hindering ‘peacekeeping’ mission in Moscow, and deprives them of the opportunity to manipulate the Azeri Amenia conflict and maintain both. [Azerbaijan and Armenia] On that political trajectory,” he said.
Although the alliance undermined Moscow’s influence in the South Caucasus, Baku sympathized with Kiev in the Russian-Ukrainian war, he said.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev also accused Russia of hampering an investigation into the collapse of Chechnya Azeri passenger planes last December.
The plane was clearly seen in panic of Russian air defense forces during a Ukrainian drone attack on Groznyu, Chechnya’s administrative capital.
Aliyev also refused to take part in the May 9 parade on Moscow’s iconic Red Square to commemorate Russia’s role in defeating Nazi Germany in 1945.
Baku vehemently resists the Kremlin campaign to force Azeri labor migrants to enlist in the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
Irukamov said Yekaterinberg’s violent stab wounds have become part of the Kremlin’s efforts “threaten the Azeri community in Russia.”
