Passenger Shoots Airport Border Police After Being Denied Entry To Moldova

Wagner fighters also likely trained in weapons capture and retention. I’d guess the border guard had his weapon in holster and the Wagner guy got a hold of it. This is why a lot of American LEO’s lock up their weapons before processing an arrestee or entering an interrogation room.

It is scary. Thinking about immigration, how people sometime even get handcuffed before being deported. I always thought they are overdoing it, but now it gets a different meaning. When I arrived in Madrid for a transit from TLV on Iberia there was a passenger that was wanted by the Spanish police the crew asked the passenger to come he refused. The police asked to inspect passports personally. I almost missed the connection to Chicago beause of this delay. I was irritated at that time. But now I am thinking how well it was handled. Sorry for the loss of life. But I am pretty sure the Spanish police intervened and tried to arraign the passenger only after all the passengers were off the plane.

Having been to Chișinău airport, I'm not surprised.

Since Russia has incited an area in Eastern Moldova to be a 'breakaway republic' from Moldova, known as Transnistria (like he did in Ukraine's Donbas area stirring up trouble from the inside) I would venture a guess that his citizenship might be Russian. That he was just flying from Tajikistan. Moldova might be have closed its borders to Russian citizens like many countries have and that was why he was being denied entry. Or citizenship could not be the issue, maybe the PMC guy was a former prisoner convicted of a felony and Moldova has a law about accepting felons. I'm sure more details will come to light. Just food for thought, theories, here of course.

While I feel sorry for the victims, my experience flying into Chisinau earlier this year can be described as horrible at best. I would skip the border control part, as I believe that may be a personal experience unlikely encountered by most of the readers here. However, it is 2023 and the country still requires people to bring no more than 2 cell phones and 1 computer (which includes laptop, computer, and tablet) into the country. I brought my laptop and my tablet, and they insisted on confiscating one of those because of that backward law they still have. After communicating with them for like 15 minutes (most of them didn't speak English or spoke broken English) in vain, I was outraged (exacerbated by my exhausting border control experience) and literally told them that "If I knew there were shitty laws like this before I booked my flight, I would never consider visiting your country, and thank you for letting me know that Moldova is the country to stay away from", which seemed to catch them off guard and, after a few more seconds of discussion, they eventually let me go and told me that this was an "exception out of their kindness". Lol. With that being said, Moldova is a nice country, with good food and wine at a cheap price, though there was not much to see there. Half of the passengers on my flight seemed to be Ukrainians returning home, as the Ukrainian airspace was still closed and Chisinau was about 3-4 hrs of bus away from Odesa.