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Moscow skinhead gang is jailed following racist murders

Other News Materials 15 December 2008 19:58 (UTC +04:00)

A Moscow city court Monday found a gang of skinheads guilty of over 20 racists murders and sentenced the seven men to serve from 6 to 20-year jail terms, dpa reported.

The gang hunted migrant workers from Central Asia and Caucasus and its members were also charged with 12 attempted murders and attacks.

Many of the group were minors. They allegedly posted videos from the series of attacks from August 2006 and October 2007 on the internet.

The reported gang leaders, Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, received 10 years each in a medium-security prison - the maximum sentence for minors.

The most severe sentence of the trial was handed to 20-year-old gang member Roman Kuzin, who got 20 years behind bars.

News agency Ria-Novosti reported the jury as finding another three racist gang youths should be granted leniency. They received between six and nine-year sentences.

Racially-motivated beatings and murders of non-Slavs have become chronic in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and advocates say a minimal public and judicial response is complicit.

This year through October 113 people died in hate crimes and 340 were wounded, a monitor group the Moscow Human Rights Bureau said.

On Sunday, an 18-year-old student from Kazakhstan was stabbed to death in southwest Moscow in an apparent racially-motivated attack.

An extreme nationalist group claimed responsibility for the beheading of a 20-year-old Tajik man murdered in Moscow last week, emailing photos of the man's severed head to the Moscow Human Rights Bureau and other hate-crime monitoring organizations.

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