STUDENT CONFESSES TO METRO STABBING
By Carl Schreck – Staff Writer
Vladimir Filonov / MT

Moscow Times, Russia
April 25, 2006

Vladimir Akinchev, left, with friends at the cemetery on Monday,
had known Vagan Abramyants since childhood.

Police arrested a high-school student in the weekend killing of an
Armenian teenager on a crowded metro platform at Pushkin Square and
he has confessed to the crime, city prosecutors said Monday.

The circumstances surrounding the killing, however, grew less clear.

Conflicting accounts appeared Monday, including some indicating that
the two boys had been acquainted.

Police detained the 17-year-old boy Sunday, and he confessed to
stabbing Vagan Abramyants, 17, a first-year student at the Moscow
Management Institute, early Saturday evening on the platform of the
Pushkinskaya metro station, City Prosecutor’s Office spokesman Sergei
Marchenko said.

Witnesses said the attackers had shaved heads, black clothes and boots,
police said following the attack. Armenian community leaders called
Abramyants a victim of a hate crime.

Marchenko declined to disclose any details about the investigation,
saying several possible motives were being investigated, including
racism.

According to his companions’ initial statements to police, Abramyants
was going with them to a weekly meeting of the Armenian diaspora being
held at the Itar-Tass building, a short walk away. As they gathered
on the platform around 5 p.m., a train heading to Vykhino entered
the station, and seven young men got off. Abramyants, who was with
11 others, was attacked, witnesses told police.

Interfax, citing police, said one of the men stabbed Abramyants in
the chest and that all of them fled on a departing train. Abramyants
died on the spot.

The investigation took a strange twist Monday when an unidentified law
enforcement source told Gazeta.ru that the suspect — an 11th-grader
at a city high school — knew Abramyants and stabbed him after the two
got into a fight. “It didn’t take long to find the probable killer,
because everyone who was on the platform knew him well,” the source
told Gazeta.ru. “Of course, in order not to turn in their acquaintance,
friends [of both boys] made up a story that some skinheads had attacked
the Armenian student after sprinting out of a metro car.”

According to other reports citing unidentified police sources,
Abramyants and his killer were part of a large group of fans of the
football club Lokomotiv who had met on the platform to go drinking.

At some point, the two teens got into an argument over a girl they
both liked, after which Abramyants was stabbed, the reports said.

Simon Tsaturyan, a lawyer representing Abramyants’ family, called
the police leaks an attempt to “falsify” what he said was “obviously
a racially motivated attack.”

“They are trying to paint this as an everyday crime,” Tsaturyan said
Monday at the Armenian Cemetery in northwest Moscow.

Dozens of Abramyants’ friends and fellow students came to the cemetery
along with hundreds of Armenians to commemorate the 1915 Armenian
genocide. Several declined to be interviewed.

One group of young men described Abramyants as “kind-hearted” and
“a great person.”

“We’d known him since childhood,” said Vladimir Akinchev, a student
at the Moscow Management Institute. “We are in shock.”

Vyacheslav Galustyan, vice president of the Union of Armenians in
Russia, said Abramyants would be buried in the Armenian Cemetery on
Tuesday or Wednesday.

Several people placed flowers at the site of the attack on Monday.