St Petersburg Times, Russia
May 26 2006

Five Suspects Linked To Racist Crime Wave
By Simon Saradzhyan and Galina Stolyarova

Staff Writer

Five men detained last week for possible ties to the killing of an
African student are being charged with killing a prominent racial
issues expert, city prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev said Wednesday at a
news conference at the City Prosecutor’s Office.

The suspects, members of the Mad Crowd group, are thought to have
taken part in the June 2004 fatal shooting of Nikolai Girenko, 64, as
revenge for Girenko’s testimony in court against another extremist
group, Schultz-88, the prosecutor said.

Girenko, who pioneered a method for classifying ethnically motivated
crimes, died after an unidentified assailant rang the doorbell of his
St. Petersburg apartment and then shot him through the closed door as
he approached it.

`The recent outburst of extremist crimes is associated with the
activities of this gang,’ Zaitsev said at the news conference. `We
have long suspected that the wave of extremist crimes was not a
symptom of a widespread nationalism, which is not typical of St.
Petersburg, but was the result of the activities of a well-organized
gang that specialized in this type of crime.’

Although the trial has not yet begun, Zaitsev’s strong words were
echoed by an even more powerful statement from Governor Valentina
Matviyenko, who suggested the gang `sought to taint the reputation of
St. Petersburg nearing the G8 summit’.

Besides the murder, the five suspects are also to be charged with
taking part in a series of other attacks and robberies, including the
2003 killing of a Chinese citizen and a 2003 attack on an Armenian
citizen, Zaitsev said.

During searches at the apartments of the detainees the police found
extremist literature. Medical examinations of the suspects have shown
that some of them have tattoos of swastikas and extremist or racist
slogans. Two of the suspects are students of local universities: one
studies at the Baltic International Tourism Institute, while another
is a student of the Herzen Pedagogical University.

The arrested men have also confessed to having incited teenagers to
attack a Tajik family. In that 2004 attack, Khursheda Sultanova, a
9-year-old Tajik girl, was stabbed to death while her father and a
sibling also suffered knife wounds.

The suspects are also being investigated for their ties to the
killings of a Vietnamese citizen and a Sengalese student, the
prosecutor said. The suspects are all in their early twenties.

Mad Crowd founder Dmitry Borovikov, who was killed last week, is also
suspected of having killed two teenagers allied with the group,
Rostislav Gofman and Aleksei Golovchenko, Fontanka.ru reported. The
two were killed because `they were the weak link and could have
betrayed the group,’ Zaitsev said. Borovikov was shot dead Thursday
after lunging at police officers with a knife.

Eight of Mad Crowd’s 13 members have been detained, Zaitsev said.
After Borovikov was killed, police arrested five other Mad Crowd
members. Searches of their apartments netted six guns, three
kilograms of TNT and extremist literature, Zaitsev said.