MOSCOW, August 31 /TASS/. Businessman German Sterligov has been detained at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport.
"He arrived in Moscow from Yerevan at 5 p.m. on Monday and was detained upon crossing the state border," Sterligov’s lawyer Artur Airapetov said.
He explained that Sterligov might have been detained because his name was on the inter-state wanted list.
The border guards detained the businessman when he was crossing the Russian state border, a police source told TASS.
As it became known on July 28, Azerbaijan asked Interpol to put Sterligov on its international wanted list for the businessman’s activities in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian inhabited enclave in South Caucasus which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but has been a de facto independent but unrecognized state that came into being after the 1994 Nagorno-Karabakh war.
Azerbaijan has initiated criminal proceedings against Sterligov on charges of making open anti-government calls and for illegal crossing of Azerbaijan’s state border (articles 281.2 and 318.2 of the Azerbaijani Penal Code, respectively).
On August 23, Airapetov said Interpol had stopped searching for Sterligov following a request from his defense lawyers and recognized that the businessman’s prosecution by Azerbaijan was politicized.
According to some reports, which previously appeared in the media, investigators could allegedly be interested in Sterligov in connection with the BORN nationalistic group though no one has ever wanted him on that case.