Abakar Gadjiyev, inset, fled to Australia for three years but is set to be arraigned in New York City on Monday. Authorities have charged him in the 2009 murder of a shopkeeper who operated Brighton Bazaar.
A pro-wrestler who was wanted in the brutal beating death of a Brooklyn shopkeeper when he fled to Australia for three years is finally set to be arraigned Monday on murder charges in New York.
Police say 37-year-old Abakar Gadjiyev was one of two men who robbed and beat businessman Vladislav Tolstykh as he was carrying cash to pay his employees on March 4, 2009.
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Tolstykh, a father of four and the owner of the Brighton Bazaar, had parked his car in an underground garage when two hooded, masked men ambushed him. They took $34,000, two expensive watches and a handful of Russian candy, police said.
Tolstykh died shortly thereafter at Coney Island Hospital.
Police believed Gadjiyev and accomplice Arsen Bashirov had planned the attack in advance and were lying in wait for more than an hour before they pounced.
The duo made it out of the country before the cops could identify them.
Bashirov fled to Turkmenistan, which doesn't have an extradition agreement with the United States. Gadjiyev eventually made his way to New South Wales, Australia, where he's performed over the years in national wrestling competitions, officials said.
Since the senseless killing, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has aggressively pushed for Gadjiyev's extradition to the United States.
The senior senator from New York penned a letter to then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to ask her to "redouble" her efforts to "promptly extradite" Gadjiyev.
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“Given the violent nature of this crime and the clear standards set forth in the US-Australian extradition treaty, I urge you to use all tools at your disposal to aggressively pursue the prompt extradition of Mr. Gadjiyev to the US so that he can be tried,” Schumer wrote Lynch in 2016.
Despite fighting extradition for years, Gadjiyev was returned to the U.S. on Friday and arrested for Tolstykh's murder.
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"I was hysterical crying, finally this is coming to an end, finally justice is being served," Tolstykh's wife, Rita, told the New York Daily News. "I hope he gets convicted, I hope he gets life because he committed murder, he took away a good man, a good father, he took away from innocent kids the chance to know their father."
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