Mafia Boss Shot in Head by Person he was Dining With

Nadir Salifov, also known as ‘Lotu Quli’, was widely renowned as one of Russia’s richest gangsters and organised criminals. The 47-year-old was shot in the head by the person he was dining with at a hotel restaurant in the Turkish city of Antalya.

A major police operation immediately sprang into place to locate the killer, who soon fled the restaurant after the shooting. The murder suspect was detained by police who pulled him over on the Antalya-Denizli highway. Salifov had been convicted of murdering two rival gang members aged 22 and was initially given the death penalty before his sentence was reduced to just 15 years in prison.

Whilst in jail in Azerbaijan he had managed to maintain his profitable gang-land activities, using an illegal mobile phone to contact the outside world and ran various extortion rackets. He was released from prison in 2017 under much fanfare and quickly re-established his reputation as a mafia leader, Russian authorities described him as “Azerbaijan’s biggest thief.”

Shortly after his release, in 2018, Salifov was arrested in Turkey on charges of incitement to murder, after an arrest warrant linked Salifov to the killing of another mafia boss, Rovshan Caniyev, in Istanbul two years earlier. It was later revealed that in 2017, 10 members of a Turkish gang known as ‘The Smurfs’ were arrested by police during a meeting with Caniyev’s brother – it is believed the gang had been offered payment to assassinate Salifov.