Prosecutor’s office launches probe into Armenian’s murder

ITAR-TASS News Agency
April 22, 2006 Saturday 02:44 PM EST

The Moscow metro prosecutor’s office has launched a probe into the
murder of a young man in a mass fight at the central Pushkinskaya
metro station on Saturday.

“Today at about 16:47 Moscow time a group of 12 young men gathered
on the platform of the Pushkinskaya station. They knew each other
and were waiting for one more acquaintance of theirs. At this time a
group of about six to seven people disembarked from a southeast-bound
train and attacked those standing on the platform without any reason.

As a result of the attack, a student of Moscow University of Management
received a stab wound in the chest, from which he died at the scene,”
a spokesman for the Moscow prosecutor’s office told Itar-Tass.

“All possible leads are being investigated, including a murder
motivated by ethnic hatred and strife,” the official said.

Earlier, law enforcement agencies said the victim had been born in
1989 in Armenia. Police have begun a search for the attacker.

Meanwhile, Moscow’s Armenian community said it would not let this pass.

“We will certainly convene on Monday. We gathered each time an
ethnic-motivated murder occurred and thought about mechanisms
that could prevent such incidents,” the president of the Union of
Armenians of Russia and the president of the World Armenian Congress,
Ara Abramyan, told Ekho Moskvy radio.

In his view such crimes can be possible only because authorities and
society do not respond properly to the manifestations of nationalism
and because they are left unpunished.

“The ethnicity of the killed man does not matter because this concerns
everybody. This is a problem for the whole of Russia. If there is
extremism and nationalism, we must call things by their proper names
and then such incidents may not occur again,” he said.