Delivery man accused of mass shawarma poisoning in Moscow

The owner of the meat got off with a fine

Details of the investigation into the criminal case of poisoning more than 50 people with shawarma in the north of Moscow have become known. Let us recall that at the end of August 2023, 53 people in Moscow were poisoned after eating products from the Bistro-24 cafe on Sofia Kovalevskaya Street. Despite the fact that all the victims were discharged from the hospital after some time, the situation caused a great stir and the criminal case was under the control of the leadership of the Investigative Committee. In hot pursuit, several people were detained, and tens of kilograms of chicken carcasses, from which shawarma and grilled chicken were prepared, were seized from circulation.

As MK learned, today there are three people in the pre-trial detention center: the owner of the bistro, the cook, and… the delivery man of those same carcasses. If everything is more or less clear with the employees of the establishment (numerous violations and unsanitary conditions were found at the workplace), then there are questions with the third accused, who simply brought meat to the cafe.

According to defense attorney Elgin Kahramanov, all this time (since August) there were no investigative actions with the delivery man other than the initial interrogation. The investigation accuses him under the article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Production, storage, transportation or sale of goods and products, performance of work or provision of services that do not meet safety requirements,” however, the examination of Rospotrebnadzor recognized the seized goods as complying with GOSTs, explained the defendant’s lawyer.

At the same time, Kahramanov’s boss, an individual entrepreneur, was merely fined for improper paperwork and released. But Elgin is still being held in a pre-trial detention center. According to the lawyers, Rospotrebnadzor reported that the results of the examination, which recognized that the goods for the cafe were of proper quality and there were no pathogens in the meat, were transferred to investigators back in September 2023. However, this study is not mentioned in any way in the materials presented to the court when choosing (extending) the preventive measure for Kahramanov.

It turns out that any deliverers of food, medicine and much more automatically fall into the risk group. Any courier could potentially end up accused as part of a group of people in the next high-profile case.

A member of the Moscow Public Monitoring Committee, Alexey Lobarev, told MK that he and his colleagues checked the conditions of detention of arrested citizens in pre-trial detention center No. 5, where a large number of young people arrested for drugs are kept. And if most pawnbrokers and couriers knew what they were getting into, then the chicken delivery guy stood out from the crowd.

“We found him in one of the cells, he was in a depressed state. The person arrested in the high-profile case told us that he was considered a foreign citizen who could escape and allegedly delivered poisoned chicken to the cafe. But he is a Russian citizen, has permanent registration, is married, has 2 dependent minor children and is the sole breadwinner. He is also a disabled person with a complex illness that requires expensive medications and constant medical supervision. He said that he had been in the “Matrosskaya Tishina” pre-trial detention center for two weeks in the hospital, but with no results,” the human rights activist said.