TEENAGER CONFESSED TO OVER 30 HATE CRIMES
by Aleksey Ivlev
RusData Dialine – Russian Press Digest
May 29, 2007 Tuesday
A teenager studying to paint icons has claimed involvement in more than
30 murders in Moscow, law enforcement sources said. Suspect Artur Ryno,
18, has claimed responsibility for 37 racially motivated murders that
he said he committed to "clean up the city," Vremya Novostey reports.
Ryno, a student at an icon painting school, has told investigators
that he began his murder spree on Aug. 21, the same day a bomb killed
13 people at Moscow’s Cherkizovsky market, the report said. On that
day, Ryno said, he and a group of skinheads provoked a fight with
a group of people from Central Asia, during which he stabbed one of
the migrants to death, the report said.
City prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said she
could not immediately comment on the reports and that details on
the investigation would be available "sometime next week." Ryno and
fellow student Pavel Skachayevsky, 18, were arrested last month on
suspicion of killing Armenian businessman Karen Abramyan. Abramyan,
46, was stabbed 20 times on the evening of April 16 in southwest
Moscow and died in the hospital.
Ryno and Skachayevsky were detained on a tram with their clothes
covered in blood and in possession of a bloody knife, and the crime
was captured on a surveillance camera. Ryno confessed to a string of
racially motivated murders after being shown the surveillance footage,
while Skachayevsky had denied any wrongdoing, Vremya Novostey writes.
The night before Abramyan’s murder, Khairullo Sadykov, 26, a street
sweeper from Tajikistan, was stabbed 35 times outside an apartment
building in eastern Moscow. Ryno confessed to Sadykov’s murder too.
Most, if not all of Ryno’s and Skachayevsky’s victims were foreigners
and were stabbed at least 20 times to delay the body identification
process, it said. Last year, 53 people were killed and 460 others
were injured in apparent hate crimes, according to the Sova human
rights center.