The market is a city within a city, with nearly 15 outdoor and indoor specialized trading sites, including two Eurasia markets, an Iliyev shop, the Rus vegetable and fruit seller, a food market, leather and footwear stores, an art gallery, and a lot of warehouses where you can buy just about anything for peanuts.
A homemade explosive device, which is said to be equivalent to over a kilogram of TNT, went off in a cafe in the Eurasia market at 10:27 a.m. Moscow time (6:27 a.m. GMT) on August 21. Witnesses say two unidentified men ran out of the cafe after leaving a bag there.
A gas container that stood nearby also exploded, and the combined blast brought down the roof over a floor space of 200 m2 and provoked panic. The ambulances that had rushed to the site could not leave the market because of the dense crowd.
According to the latest data, eight to 10 people, including one child, were killed and 41 wounded in the blast.
The Cherkizovsky market has never been a safe place. There have been four fires there in the past few years, and it was a miracle that nobody died in a fire in the warehouses in 2005. Nevertheless, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people come there daily (some estimates put the figure at one million).
The market's operators are skilled professionals luring more buyers and registering bigger turnovers than any of the Moscow retail chains. Cherkizovsky was set up in the early 1990s and soon set the pace for local traders. There are no lines in Moscow shops because people know that markets are where you can bargain and buy at a fair price.
Three years ago, the Moscow authorities decided to move trading indoors and liquidate some trading sites and warehouses, so as to build residential blocks and offices in their place. But the plan was eventually abandoned, because Cherkizovsky could not be dealt with straight from the shoulder.
The market attracts millions of buyers and hundreds of millions of dollars. Sites in the market belong to some of the richest people in Moscow, Russia and neighboring states, which explains the name, Eurasia. Azerbaijanis Telman Ismailov and Zarakh Iliyev, who between them own a substantial part of the market, are dollar multimillionaires.
Forbes Russia writes that Iliyev, who had bought the Stalin-era Ukraina Hotel in a tender, gets about $0.5 billion of rent a year from his real estate.
Ismailov used the market's profits to purchase a major Moscow shop, Voentorg, within walking distance of the Kremlin, and a plot of land for development in Moscow's "golden mile" on the Boulevard Ring Road.
According to the Prosecutor General's Office, which is investigating the explosion, the most likely motive is "a turf war between commercial groups," although terrorism is also under consideration. Moscow markets, which replaced the Soviet-era trading system, almost always have criminal connections, and disputes are frequently resolved with bombs and guns there.
Some events that preceded the Cherkizovsky explosion:
Igor Liberman, deputy director of the Cheryomushki market off Leninski Prospekt in Moscow, and his wife and daughter were killed in May. The killers set fire to the victims, but police found proof of violent death.
A week before, a Georgian criminal group that clashed for trading sites with Armenian rivals shot two Moscow policemen who had tried to stop the fighting.
Two years ago, Vasily Panov, director of the Kolomenskoye food market in southeast Moscow, and Yury Markelov, director of the Tyoply Stan market in southern Moscow, were killed. At approximately the same time Sergei Melnikov, director of the Veshnyaki trading house in eastern Moscow, was gravely wounded by a hired killer.
In late 2002, Oleg Mitrofanov, director of the Krasnoselsky Klondike market in Moscow, was killed by a hired murderer.
Of late, attempts have been made (not always successfully) on the lives of co-founders and directors of markets in Sergiyev Posad and Shelkovo in the Moscow Region, in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, in Samara on the Volga, and in dozens of other Russian cities. This latest incident is just more superfluous proof of criminal connections in the market business.
