RUSSIAN POLICE CADET ARRESTED IN RACIST SLAYING
Agence France Presse
September 13, 2006
Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, DC
A Russian police cadet has been arrested on suspicion of racially
motivated murder after a knife attack on a 17-year-old student of
Armenian descent, the prosecutor’s office said Wednesday.
"Nikita Senyukov, who was born in 1988 and was a fourth-year student
at Police Academy Number One in Moscow, has been arrested on suspicion
of killing Vigen Abramyants this April," the prosecutor general said
in a statement.
The prosecutor refused to comment on a report in Russian daily
Kommersant that the police cadet was a member of a nationalist
organization linked to a racist market bombing in Moscow that killed
11 people last month.
Senyukov, who is the son of a high-ranking policeman, was arrested
due to information provided by three suspects in the market bombing,
Kommersant reported.
The newspaper described the three bombing suspects and police cadet
Senyukov as "supporters of the nationalist organization Russian
All-National Union," though it said that the organization denied that
the four were members.
The stabbing of Vigen Abramyants, an ethnic Armenian, took place in
the Pushkinskaya metro station in central Moscow in the daytime.
Russian NGOs have decried the rising number of racially motivated
killings in the country, with the Sova group counting 14 such
killings from March to May of this year, up from four in the same
period of 2005.
NGOs accuse police and prosecutors of frequently disregarding
racial hatred as a motivation, classifying the attacks instead as
"hooliganism."