Scandal in the lion park in Crimea: An animal killed a man, they tried to hide the incident
The body of a 29-year-old man was discovered on January 15 on the territory of the Crimean lion park “Taigan”. This was reported by the official website of the Investigative Directorate of the Russian Federation for Crimea. A criminal case has been opened.
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Shortly before the official announcement of the incident, the first information was published on his blog by the head of the Crimean Republican Anti-Corruption Committee organization, Ilya Bolshedvorov.
“An accident occurred at the Taigan Zoo. A few days ago, an animal attacked one of the workers. He was not taken to the hospital after that; assistance was provided by a veterinarian. The man died from his wounds. I don’t know the details, but it sounds terrifying,” Bolshedvorov said, publishing photographs of the corpse a little later.
A video of an interview with the grandmother of the deceased, whose name was Maxim, appeared online. The woman said that the deceased was a drinker, lost a good job in Simferopol and made money by bringing dead cattle to Taigan to feed the lions. At the same time, he drove without a license.
“He drove at night. I tried to dissuade him from driving without a license, but he said: “If they stop me, I’ll call Zubkov (Oleg Zubkov, owner of Taigan - ed.), and he will tell me off,” says the grandmother.
According to her, when Maxim’s corpse was handed over to his relatives, the police said that he was “bitten by dogs.”
“The head was torn from ear to ear, a piece of meat was torn out and sewn up roughly, not in a medical manner. There was some kind of rag on my leg and cellophane on top. They also told us that under his pillow there was a referral for hospitalization,” the woman said.
A source close to the investigation claims that the “cut head” is the result of an autopsy of the body. The wound of the deceased was allegedly only on his leg. He went to the hospital with her, but refused hospitalization and did not take the prescribed medications. Died from blood poisoning.
The political context for this event is given by the personality of the owner of Taigan, as well as the Yalta Zoo Skazka, Oleg Zubkov. Having initially supported the reunification of Crimea with Russia, a year later he came into conflict with the new authorities.
In the summer of 2015, the Crimean prosecutor’s office established the fact of bodily harm being caused to an employee of the Taigan safari park. In December of the same year, the Belogorsky District Court found Zubkov guilty of beating his subordinate and sentenced him to three years of suspended imprisonment with a probationary period of one year.
As a sign of protest, Zubkov announced the closure of his zoos, but they remained open throughout the next year.
At the same time, Zubkov gave interviews to Ukrainian media in which he criticized the Russian authorities and called Crimea a “concentration camp.”
Now he is in China, and after the incident, PR publications continued on the businessman’s Facebook page, as if nothing had happened, encouraging people to visit the lion park.
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