DUSHANBE, August 4, 2016, Asia-Plus – Tajik teenager has been brutally killed in St. Petersburg.

Peterburgskaya Gazeta reports the police are investigating brutal killing of a 17-year-old national of Tajikistan.  The incident reportedly took place in St. Petersburg’s Kransogvardeysky district Wednesday night.

Tajik national was beat to death by a group of local teens armed with knives and bats.  He also sustained multiple stab wounds and phalanges of two fingers of hands were cut off.

Three local residents aged 16 to 18 as well as a 15-year-old girl were detained on suspicion of committing that brutal killing.  Bats, knives and machete were confiscated from them.  

We will recall that a nine-year-old Tajik girl was stabbed to death in St. Petersburg by suspected skinheads in February 2004.  Police said a group of youths armed with knives and bats attacked the girl, stabbing her 11 times.  Her father and an 11-year old boy were also hospitalized with head wounds.  The attack was being widely seen in Russia as racist in origin.

Racism in Russia reportedly appears mainly in the form of negative attitudes and actions by some Russians towards people who they do not consider white.  Traditionally, Russian racism included anti-Semitism, as well as hostility towards various ethnicities of Caucasus and Central Asia.  The director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, Alexander Brod, stated that surveys show xenophobia and other racist expressions are prevalent in 50 percent of Russians.  In 2006, Amnesty International reported that racism in Russia was “out of control” and estimated the number of Russian neo-Nazis at around 85,000 in 2008.