News reports from Moscow say that Umar Dzhabrailov, a wealthy businessman and former member of the Russian parliament, could face criminal charges after allegedly firing a pistol in a luxury hotel near the Kremlin.
State-run news agency TASS reported on August 30, citing the Moscow police press service, that police opened a criminal investigation on suspicion of hooliganism after an incident the previous night at the Four Seasons hotel.
The suspect fired several shots at a ceiling in the hotel just off Red Square, TASS reported. Nobody was hurt.
Several Russian media outlets reported, citing unidentified law enforcement officials, that Dzhabrailov was detained, but reports later on August 30 said that he had been released on condition that he remain in Moscow.
Dzhabrailov represented his native Chechnya region in Russia's upper parliament house in 2004-09. He was a deputy chairman of the chamber's International Relations Committee and a member of Russia's delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
Dzhabrailov's name became widely known amid a dispute over ownership of the Radisson Slavyanskaya hotel in Moscow. His partner in the project, American businessman Paul Tatum, was shot dead near the hotel in November 1996, months after he had publicly accused Dzhabrailov of planning to kill him.
Dzhabrailov ran for president in 2000, receiving about 80,000 votes in the election that handed President Vladimir Putin his first term.
He is the founder of Avanti, a lobby group that says its mission is the promotion of "patriotic business."
Hooliganism is punishable by up to five years in prison if a weapon is used in committing the crime.
