Moscow News (Russia)
April 28, 2006
LATEST STABBING DEATH A MYSTERY
By Julia Duchovny The Moscow News
The brutal knifing death of an ethnic Armenian student in a crowded
subway station Saturday afternoon sent shockwaves through a society
already weary with allegations of xenophobia and the debates that
rage around it.
The media has been quick to report attacks against non-Russians,
making them appear more frequent in the last months, while rights
groups warn of growing nationalist tensions across the country. The
act of violence itself is often buried beneath speculations of
various political motivations, and the incident involving Vigen
Abramyants was further complicated by conflicting reports among
police, witnesses, and family.
Racial Hatred or Teenage Spat?
According to initial reports, Vigen (also reported as Vagan)
Abramyants, 17, waiting with friends in the middle of the platform at
central Moscow’s crowded Pushkinskaya Station, when a gang of about
20 young men in black with shaved heads attacked the group, targeting
Abramyants and stabbing him in the heart. The attackers then
dispersed, while Abramyants died in the arms of a friend before help
arrived.
The story changed Monday, however, as police announced that they had
captured a suspect who confessed to the killing. Denis Kulagin, 17,
was said to have been among the group of friends Abramyants had been
waiting with. According to police reports, Kulagin came to the
station with his girlfriend, Zhanna Nefedova, and was waiting for a
group of football fans. Abramyants was in that group and said
something insulting to Zhanna, after which Kulagin allegedly stabbed
him with a knife. “We can definitely say that the killing occurred as
a result of a disagreement,” a police source was quoted by the
state-owned RIA Novosti news agency as saying, “and there was no
racial motivations in this case.”
Some Russian media immediately denounced the official version as
incorrect. The Gazeta daily reported that investigators had a tape of
video surveillance in the station depicting a group of young people
standing on the platform, with one of the individuals suddenly
falling to the ground. The daily quoted the Abramyants family’s
attorney, Simon Tsaturyan, as saying that prosecutors refused to show
him the tape, claiming it did not exist. Izvestia cited the same
tape, but said that the recording showed no signs of skinheads.
But another problem was that there was no knife. The Izvestia daily
reported visiting Zhanna’s family and learning that police had raided
their apartment searching for the weapon. More troubling still was an
interview given by Kulagin’s mother, Olga, to the Komsomolskaya
Pravda tabloid, alleging police pressure. “We were given a choice,”
she reportedly said, “either Denis goes to jail for fifteen years for
a racially-motivated murder, or he gets less if it was over a common
dispute. They promised a suspended sentence…
I insisted that Denis sign the confession that the conflict arose
because of the girl. Then when I got home I realized I had broken his
life.”
The account given by Zhanna’s mother, Olga Nefedova, in an interview
published by Izvestia strangely coincided with Olga Kulagina’s.
Nefedova reportedly did not allow journalists to talk to her
daughter, but recalled how Zhanna spoke of a group of skinheads
looking for a victim. Nefedova denied that Kulagin really killed the
student, and said he told Zhanna to run when the attackers approached
them. Zhanna never actually saw Abramyants getting stabbed, but told
her mother she saw a knife in one of the attacker’s hands.
By Wednesday, police told news agencies they were investigating two
versions of the incident, and could not rule out either Kulagin’s
involvement, nor a racially-motivated attack by skinheads. Kulagin,
who, despite being a minor, was interrogated without an attorney or
his mother present, withdrew his confession.
Subway Fury or Provocative Rumor?
Moscow police were already on heightened alert the weekend of the
killing. Hitler’s birthday is April 20, while two football matches
were being hosted in the city, which tend to draw crowds of rowdy
fans onto public transportation. By Monday, Russian newspapers and
blogs were awash with reports of football hooligans beating up
non-Russians on the Moscow subway. Official reports confirmed another
killing, meanwhile: a Tajik was stabbed to death.
But in another incident Saturday, a few Muscovites reported over the
Internet of being in the middle of a hooligan attack as a group of
young people stormed into a subway car and began beating up
passengers. According to one witness, one of the most seriously
injured victims was a man of non-Russian ethnicity. But there were
several aspects that made the entire story suspect. After the
Gazeta.ru online newspaper ran it, the two witnesses who had first
written about the story in Livejournal deleted their posts.
Meanwhile, the subway police told Gazeta.ru they had heard nothing
whatsoever of the incident. Despite a long thread in Gazeta.ru’s
forum describing similar incidents all over the city, some
journalists became wary that some of these reports were part of a
disinformation campaign – echoing long-time conspiracy theories among
nationalist bloggers that attacks against non-Russians were nothing
but a propaganda campaign to discredit Russia itself.MN