RUSSIA:RUSSIAN PROSECUTORS yesterday charged a skinhead gang led by two teenagers with the racist murders of 20 people during a series of brutal attacks in Moscow.
Prosecutors said they had charged nine people aged between 17 and 22 with the murders. They identified the ringleaders as Artur Ryno - an art student - and Pavel Skachevsky.
One of the gang members was a 22-year-old woman, who allegedly videotaped an attack on one of the victims, a student from Azerbaijan who was severely beaten but survived.
The gang targeted victims from post-Soviet republics who were working and studying in Moscow. Ryno was arrested after allegedly stabbing to death an Armenian businessman in April 2007.
He told police he had killed more than 30 people, adding that "the city needed to be cleaned" of foreigners.
The case follows repeated accusations from human rights groups that authorities in Russia fail to investigate racist killings, often labelling xenophobic attacks as hooliganism.
According to Sova, a rights group, there were at least 232 victims of hate crime in the first five months of 2008, including 57 murders. "It's clear that there is a kind of heroisation on the neo-Nazi scene for those who carry them out," said a spokesman, Alexander Verkhovsky, regarding assaults. Some 600 racist attacks took place last year, but only 20 convictions followed, he said.
Russian sociologists have struggled to explain the phenomenon of rising neo-Nazism and xenophobia in a country that lost millions of citizens to Nazi invaders in the second World War.
Last month, neo-Nazis daubed swastikas on a memorial in Moscow to members of the Jewish anti-fascist committee.
Last year a video surfaced showing the killing by neo-Nazis of two men from the Caucasus, who were decapitated. Russian officials at first claimed the video was fake. They began an investigation only after Artur Umadanov from Dagestan recognised his missing brother Shamil, who went to Moscow and disappeared in 2007. - ( Guardian service)