MOSCOW HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT DETAINED IN ALLEGED RACE HATE KILLING
RIA Novosti, Russia
April 24, 2006
MOSCOW, April 24 (RIA Novosti) – Police officers have detained a high
school student in connection with the killing of an Armenian teenager
in the Moscow subway at the weekend, prosecutors said Monday.
“A 17-year-old student from a Moscow high school has been detained in
connection with the killing of an Armenian committed last Saturday,”
a spokesman for the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office said, adding that the
teenager had admitted his involvement in the incident.
Vagan Abramyants, a 17-year-old student at the Moscow Academy of
Management was attacked and stabbed to death on the platform of
Pushkinskaya metro station in the center of the capital at about 5
p.m. on Saturday.
Prosecutors launched a criminal case into the killing, which they
said could be racially motivated.
But a source close to investigation said the suspect, who has been
identified as a soccer fan, claimed that the victim had insulted his
girlfriend in a subway train and he stabbed the man to get even.
“We can now say with certainty that the slaying occurred after a
common argument and was not racially motivated,” the source said,
adding that a group of soccer fans was presumably heading to watch
a game played by their favorite club.
Nevertheless, it is the latest of a series of attacks across
the country that have affected foreigners and people with a dark
complexion.
In St. Petersburg, an African student was shot dead with a rifle marked
with a swastika on April 7, while two Mongolian students were beaten
up in the city’s subway a week later. A Chinese student was attacked
outside her apartment block this month, while a nine-year-old girl of
mixed Russian and African origin was hospitalized after being stabbed
near her apartment building March 25.
Four Chinese students, studying at Kostroma State University in
central Russia, were attacked last Friday afternoon outside a school.
These incidents have prompted Russian and foreign human-rights groups
to raise concerns over the alarming spread of racist and xenophobic
attitudes in the country.