Lawyer: youths kill Armenian teen while yelling ‘Glory to Russia!’ in Moscow
suburb
AP Worldstream; May 30, 2006
Prosecutors opened a hate crime investigation into the fatal stabbing of an
Armenian teenager at a Moscow suburban train station, a prosecutors’ official
said Tuesday.
Artur Sardaryan, 19, was killed Thursday in the latest in a string of
racially motivated attacks in Moscow and throughout Russia.
Yelena Rossokhina, a spokeswoman for Moscow regional prosecutors, said three
young men approached Sardaryan as he sat on a regional commuter train around
11:30 p.m. and stabbed him for no apparent reasons. He died later on the way
to a hospital, she said.
Lawyer Simon Tsaturyan told Ekho Moskvy radio that witnesses reported the
youths yelling “Glory to Russia!” and “Long Live Russia!”
Russia in recent years has seen an increase in racially motivated attacks on
foreigners and dark-skinned immigrants from the poorer Caucasus region and
Central Asia.
Last month, an apparent skinhead fatally stabbed an Armenian student on a
central Moscow subway platform.