Skinheads record attacks - jailed
2011-05-05 22:37
St Petersburg - A Russian court jailed 19 skinheads on Thursday for up to nine years for carrying out a series of brutal race attacks, including two murders, and then posting films of the assaults on the Internet.
The group's leader, Andrei Linok, 20, who goes under the alias Lincoln-88, received the highest sentence of nine years at the hearing in Saint Petersburg, while the other gang members, aged 17 to 23, received lesser terms of up to seven years, a court spokesperson told AFP.
The group were convicted of 12 hate crimes in 2007 against non-Slavic looking people, including the murders of an Armenian and an Uzbek. Their trial had heard how many of the attacks were filmed and then uploaded by the gang onto the internet.
At the time of the attacks, Linok was still in his final year of school in the town of Zelenogorsk and most of the other members were minors.
Attacks against foreigners of non-European appearance occur regularly in Russia, although the authorities say that numbers have been dropping amid a crackdown on extremist organisations.
An NGO that monitors hate crimes, Sova, said in a report released in March that there were 37 hate killings in 2010, while 382 people were injured in attacks with racist or neo-nazi motives.
- SAPA
