Russian police have questioned a young neo-Nazi who claimed to be the internet distributor of a video that apparently shows the execution of two non-Slavs.
The video purports to show the brutal execution of a Tadjik national and an ethnic Dagestani man against the backdrop of a Nazi flag. One victim is beheaded and the other shot while kneeling by a readymade grave, to shouts of “Glory to Russia”.
The 24-year-old man, a student from the southern Russian town of Maikop, turned himself in to the police after a public scandal over the video. Police said that he claimed to have spent two years uploading material intended to incite ethnic hatred to the internet.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said: “This man has declared his devotion to National Socialist ideas. According to preliminary information, he has been distributing this video over the internet but he is not the author of it. Experts are still working to establish the authenticity of the video.”
Police searched the man’s home and confiscated his computer, along with some extremist literature. He was not held but was under orders not to leave town, said Echo radio station.
Police were going through the three-minute video frame by frame to determine whether it was staged or depicted an actual execution, the radio station said. “They will compare light and shade, changes in the background image, details of clothing and other parameters.”
Human rights activists, concerned at the exponential growth of racist violence in Russia over recent years, said that the video was among the nastiest they had come across.
“I’ve never seen anything so blatant,” said Alexander Verkhovsky, head of the Sova centre, which monitors hate crime.
Svetlana Gannushkina of Memorial, an organisation monitoring torture in the Northern Caucasus, said: “It is an absolute nightmare. I have looked through the site and unfortunately there were mainly positive comments on the video. Actually, this has nothing to do with virtual life; this is our real life.”
The video, which appeared on a blog on Livejournal.com, showed the two men bound and gagged in a forest with a pair of masked captors. The caption said that one was from the mainly Muslim region of Dagestan - part of the Russian Federation - while the other was from the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan. A heavy-metal backing track accompanies their execution.
A previously unknown group calling itself “the military wing of the National-Socialist Society” claimed responsibility for the video, circulating an online statement on Tuesday which proclaimed “the start of our party’s armed struggle against coloured colonists and the Russian bureaucrats who support them".
The National-Socialist Society, whose site covers the activities of neo-Nazis around Russia, denied that it had such a wing. But it added: We acknowledge that any autonomous national-socialist group could certainly have committed the execution shown in the video. It would be an entirely predictable reaction to continuing pressure from the authorities.”
Far from putting pressure on neo-fascists, who have murdered and wounded dozens of immigrants in street attacks, the Russian authorities have seemingly turned a blind eye to race hate or even encourage it, according to Amnesty International.
However, President Vladimir Putin has spoken out against the scourge of neo-Nazism amid an increasing number of criminal prosecutions. Last week in St Petersburg a young neo-Nazi was sentenced to 12 years in prison for stabbing an anti-fascist activist to death outside a bookshop.
Those from the Caucasus and Central Asia, who make up an army of guest workers in Russia, are most vulnerable to racist attacks, along with dark-skinned students from the developing world.
From Times Online
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