RUSSIA: Police in Russia are investigating the murder of two Gypsies in the latest of a spate of violent attacks on foreigners and people from ethnic minorities.
The two brothers, aged 26 and 27, were shot dead in Kuznetsovka in the northwest of the country by an attacker with a hunting rifle. A 23-year-old suspect has been arrested, but police said there was no evidence that the attack on Sunday was race-related.
Last week a gang of young men attacked a Gypsy camp in the southern Volgograd region, beating to death a man and a woman and seriously injuring a 14-year-old girl and an 80-year-old woman. Nine suspects are being questioned.
On Saturday two Mongolian students were taken to hospital after a group of young men attacked them in St Petersburg. A Senegalese student was shot dead in the city this month by an assailant using a gun emblazoned with a swastika.
Critics yesterday blamed the Kremlin. "The Russian authorities are not eloquent or explicit enough in expressing themselves or in the pursuit of a policy of curbing nationalism and xenophobia," the veteran liberal politician Grigory Yavlinksy told reporters. "They are trying to play down the situation. That is wrong and very dangerous."
Police have been accused of charging many perpetrators of attacks on dark-skinned people with hooliganism, rather than race crimes, which carry higher sentences. Last year a political party was banned from local elections in Moscow after a campaign broadcast that equated dark-skinned immigrants with rubbish that needed to be cleaned from the city.
Gypsies are frequently the target of ultra-nationalist sentiment. A Roma man was abducted and killed in Pskov in western Russia in September, and an eight-year-old girl died in an arson attack on her home near Novosibirsk in December. Ethnic minorities such as Chechens from the north Caucasus region, as well as immigrants from central Asia and students from African countries are also singled out for attack.