ANOTHER ARMENIAN YOUTH MURDERED IN RUSSIA

Armenpress
May 30 2006

MOSCOW, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS: A 19 year-old Armenian boy, Arthur
Sardarian, was killed on May 25 in a train bound from Moscow to
the town of Pushkin, where his family of Armenian refugees from
Azerbaijan lived.

This was the second killing of an Armenian youth in one month. In
late April a 17-year-old Armenian native Vigen Abramyants, a Moscow
university student, was attacked and stabbed to death by a group of
skinheads on a Metro platform. He died on the spot.

Abramyants’ murder prompted sharp criticism from the Union of Russian
Armenians, whose chairman Ara Abrahamian, slammed Russian authorities
for avoiding to classify these killings as racially motivated.

The second victim, Arthur Sardarian, was reportedly killed by a gang of
skinheads. The police said he was stabbed to death receiving several
knife strikes in his back and the heart and died immediately. Russian
police have opened a criminal case into the murder classifying it as
a hate crime. According to an eye-witness, the attackers, who chased
the Armenian boy in the carriage before reaching him shouted’ Long Live
Russia.” An eye-witness said the people in the car did not interfere.

The international human rights watchdog-Amnesty International, said
in its latest report that racist killings in Russia were “out of
control.” The Amnesty report, entitled “Russian Federation: Violent
racism out of control”, includes examples of police and prosecutors
routinely classifying murders and serious assaults by skinhead
extremists as the lesser crime of “hooliganism”.