TEENS JAILED FOR RACIST ATTACKS
Melbourne Herald Sun
September 23, 2008 02:47am
Australia
A RUSSIAN court jailed members of a teenage gang for terms of up to
10 years after the youths were found guilty of racist attacks during
August and September 2007 in which two people died.
The 13 teenagers were Moscow school students when they attacked people
who did not look European, a spokeswoman for the court said. Twelve
of the gang were under 18 when they committed the crimes.
She said the accused had been found guilty of about 10 racist
attacks. The two dead victims were a 46-year-old chess master from
Russia’s Siberian region of Yakutia and a 23-year-old violin player
of Armenian origin.
A 19-year-old was sentenced to a maximum term of 10 years in jail, the
court said. Prosecutors believe he took part in the two killings. Two
underage defendants were given a minimum term of three years.
The youths used knives and baseball bats to attack strangers in Moscow
streets, parks and trains and then posted mobile phone pictures of
the assaults on Internet sites.
The Internet images were the main evidence used by prosecutors against
the defendants in court, Russia’s state Vesti-24 channel said.
It ran some of the sequences featuring groups of teenagers chasing
darker-skinned victims, sometimes knocking them to the ground and
violently kicking them. A separate one showed a youngster chasing a
man with a hammer.
Several teenagers were also shown attacking a pregnant woman walking
with a little child in a pram.
Russian courts are currently hearing several cases of racist groups,
including one involving a teenage gang accused of 20 premeditated
and 12 attempted murders.
Local anti-fascist campaigners have repeatedly urged the authorities
to tackle rising xenophobia and neo-Nazism in Russia, which lost
millions of its citizens fighting fascism during World war II.