In Russia, a Grisly Message Marks Rise in Hate Crimes

MOS COW, Dec. 13 -- The e-mail that arrived Monday night in the inboxes of two organizations tracking hate crimes in Russia carried a disturbing message and an even more disturbing photo -- that of a man's severed head resting on a wooden chopping block.

"This surprise was prepared for Moscow officials by concerned Russian people who can no longer tolerate the invasion of foreigners in their native city," the message declared, accusing darker-skinned migrant workers from the Caucasus and Asia of "an unprecedented wave of criminality that has swamped our capital."

"If officials continue to populate Russia with foreigners, we will have to start annihilating officials! Because there is no worse enemy than a traitor with the authorities who has betrayed his Russian origin," it continued. "Officials, if you do not start evicting the blacks, we will begin taking revenge on you for their crimes! And it will be your turn to pay with your heads."

The e-mail was no hoax. Earlier in the day, a street cleaner had found a man's head wrapped in a plastic bag on a grassy area outside a government building in western Moscow. An autopsy confirmed it belonged to a native of Tajikistan whose decapitated body was discovered last week in woods south of the city.

The beheading was splashed across the front pages of newspapers Friday. Although hate crimes, often by young neo-Nazi skinheads, are increasingly common in Russia, analysts say this is the first racially motivated killing to be accompanied by a political demand and a public claim of responsibility.

The e-mail was signed by a group calling itself the Militant Organization of Russian Nationalists, which neither police nor human rights groups had heard of previously.

"It's an outrageous crime and very worrying," said Natalia Rykova, executive director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, one of the groups that received the e-mail. "It shows how cruel and inhuman the neo-Nazis can be, and that their ideology is becoming more popular."

Through the first 10 months of the year, Rykova's group recorded 269 hate crimes in Russia involving the deaths of 114 people, more than twice as many as last year. Most of the victims were migrant laborers from the impoverished former Soviet republics of Central Asia, as many as 10 million of whom work in Russia and are a critical source of cheap labor in a country with a shrinking native workforce.

Police identified the man who was decapitated as Salahetdin Azizov, 20, a Tajik migrant employed at a fruit-and-vegetable warehouse. He and another Tajik worker were walking home Friday night when a group of 10 unidentified men attacked them, police said. Azizov was stabbed six times before he was beheaded. His co-worker escaped and remains hospitalized in critical condition.

The Tajik government has lodged a formal protest with the Kremlin over the case and complained that police are slow to investigate hate crimes against Tajik citizens, including 80 murders in Russia this year.

Azizov's head was discovered near a government building in Mozhaisky District, a neighborhood that has been a focus of nationalist outrage since the Oct. 1 rape and strangulation of a 15-year-old Russian girl there, allegedly by a city maintenance worker from Uzbekistan.

Nationalist groups have staged angry rallies in the district, demanding that the government "cleanse" the city of migrant workers, and racist graffiti has proliferated in the neighborhood. On Nov. 4, the national People's Unity Day holiday, a man from Turkmenistan was stabbed to death in the area, and many fearful migrants in the district have quit jobs and moved.

Police have questioned the leaders of two nationalist groups about the decapitation, but they denied any involvement. One of them, Alexander Belov of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, told the Interfax news agency that he had never heard of the organization that asserted responsibility. But he said that government efforts to suppress groups such as his are causing "an increase in radical tendencies."

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has condemned racist violence but also called for new limits on the number of work permits given to migrant laborers -- a position critics say is impractical and inflames xenophobic sentiment. Last month, a Kremlin-controlled youth group staged a rally calling on officials to close the borders to migrants so more jobs would be available for Russians during the economic crisis.

A police spokesman said detectives are examining "various theories" in Azizov's killing and had "no proof of the suggestion that skinheads might have been involved."

But Rykova said the authorities were denying the obvious. She warned that violence could get worse if the economic crisis intensifies and politicians continue to use xenophobic rhetoric. "We're sitting on a mine that can blow up at any moment," she said.