Turkish seiner captain kidnapped under mysterious circumstances in Abkhazia

The captain of a Turkish fishing boat has gone missing under mysterious circumstances in Abkhazia.

49-year-old Turkish citizen Selim Kaya, the captain, was sitting in a cafe in Ochamchire last Friday evening when he decided it was time to leave, and he asked a local there to give him a lift to the port. He got into the BMW of the man whose name the police has yet to release and set off in that direction.

But just a few dozen meters later, they were stopped by two armed men in masks. Threatening them with pistols, they forced the driver to get out, got into the car and drove off in an unknown direction, taking the captain with them.

The police spend the whole night, searching for the kidnappers. On 10 February, the BMW was found on a country road not far from the village of Beslakhuba. The windshield had been shot through and a Makarov pistol was found in the car. There were no traces of blood.

The only information released by the police is that the incident is now subject to a criminal investigation.

M

any in Abkhazia remember a similar incident that happened at around the same location about a year and a half ago.

On 29 September 2016, a Russian businessman, Vachagan Petrosyan, who was then almost 60, was kidnapped in the Ochamchire region.

The police say that the car in which Petrosyan and another individual were riding was stopped by a police vehicle. Later, the vehicle and the policemen in it would turn out to have been fake.

They forced Petrosyan and his companion into their car and took him to the village of Tsagera, where almost no one has lived since the end of the Abkhaz-Georgian war in the 1990s. There, they dropped off Petrosyan’s companion, who turned out to be the director of the Ochamchire asphalt factory, and took Petrosyan to an unknown location.

Petrosyan’s vehicle and the fake police car were later found to have been burnt.

Vachagan Petrosyan has been missing ever since.

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