MOSCOW – A Russian judge who sentenced racists for hate crimes was shot dead yesterday in the stairwell of his apartment building as he left for work, officials said.
Eduard Chuvashov (47) was shot in the chest and head and died on the spot outside his flat near the centre of Moscow, the prosecutor general’s investigative unit said in a statement. Possible links between his work and his murder are being examined.
Mr Chuvashov last week sentenced two members of the far-right Ryno Gang to 10 years in prison. Convicted of killing 20 people of “non-Slavic” appearance, they triumphantly posted videos of their brutal killings online.
“Everything will be done so that the organisers and perpetrators of this cynical murder be found and punished,” President Dmitry Medvedev said.
An unnamed law enforcement source quoted by Russian news agencies said racists were likely to be behind the murder. That would make it the second high-profile killing to be carried out by them in Russia in as many years.
Activists warn that increasing xenophobia and a corrupt police force allow far-right groups to prosper.
At least 60 people were killed in Russia last year in hate crimes, and 306 injured, according to Sova, a non-governmental organisation that tracks racist violence in the country.
“It could be retribution from far-right groups,” Allison Gill from the Moscow branch of Human Rights Watch said of Mr Chuvashov’s death.
She added that judges, lawyers, human rights defenders and journalists had “now become the clear targets” of racists in Russia.
Judge Chuvashov also jailed at least nine members of the Russian fascist group known as the White Wolves in February. Made up mostly of teenagers, the group was found to be responsible for 11 brutal murders.
The victims were dark-skinned migrants from Central Asia. Several of them had been bludgeoned to death.
In January 2009, human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and opposition journalist Anastasia Baburova were killed near the Kremlin. Markelov had represented the mother of an anti-fascist campaigner in 2006 who said her son was killed by neo-Nazis.
The one-year commemoration of their deaths in January drew 1,000 people, who demanded a crackdown on neo-nationalists, an unusually large crowd for a Moscow demonstration. – (Reuters)