By Anatoly Medetsky
Staff Writer The recent terrorist attacks caused a spike in assaults on dark-skinned people from the Caucasus region and elsewhere last week, human rights activists said.
Decorated former test pilot Magomed Tolboyev said Friday that he was assaulted by police officers during a document check near the Vykhino metro station. The officers said he had a Chechen-sounding last name, he said.
In Yekaterinburg, gangs of young people attacked three Armenian and Azeri cafes, killing one person and injuring two, police said.
Authorities have blamed the downing of two planes, the explosion near a Moscow metro station and the Beslan school siege on Chechen, Ingush and Arab fighters and suicide bombers.
Dark-skinned people have in recent years increasingly been the targets of racially motivated attacks — attacks that police usually write off as hooliganism. But the increase over the past week can only be attributed to the terror attacks, said Alexander Brod, director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights.
“Anti-Caucasian sentiments always get stronger after terrorist acts,” Brod said. “People blame everyone in the Caucasus. This is the stereotype in people’s minds.
“Unfortunately, the authorities don’t do a good job explaining that terrorism doesn’t have a nationality,” he said.
Tolboyev, an assistant to State Duma Deputy Viktor Semyonov and a native of Dagestan, said two police sergeants stopped him to check his papers Thursday near Vykhino in Moscow’s southern outskirts.
He showed them his Duma ID and told them that he had been decorated with the title Hero of Russia, which he received for his participation in the Soviet space shuttle program, Interfax reported.
The officers took the ID. When Tolboyev attempted to get it back, one of the officers went behind him, put his arm around his neck and began to strangle him, Tolboyev said.
“My throat still aches, and I haven’t been able to swallow for two days,” he said, Interfax reported.
Asked by telephone Friday why the officers had confronted him, Tolboyev said, “I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t like something about me.”
Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin confirmed Sunday that police had stopped Tolboyev to check his documents. But he said a police investigation found that Tolboyev had been treated properly considering his “disobedience, aggression and abuse.” He did not elaborate.
Tolboyev said he was stopped as he was returning from the North Ossetian administration’s office in Moscow, where he had expressed his condolences over the school siege.
He said he finally got back his ID.
In the Urals, a group of young people broke furniture in the Azeri Kaspy cafe in Yekaterinburg on Thursday night and then hurled in Molotov cocktails, according to news reports. A 52-year-old relative of the cafe’s owner died in the fire, which gutted the building.
That same night, about 20 young people armed with sticks and chains broke into an Armenian cafe, Oasis Plus, and beat the Armenian staff, wounding four. Two were hospitalized with skull and brain injuries, news reports said.
Attackers tossed Molotov cocktails in another Armenian cafe, the Shartash, on Thursday night, but the staff was able to douse the flames before anyone was injured.
In a fourth attack Thursday, unidentified men set fire to the U Davida, an Armenian cafe in Verkhnyaya Pyshma, a village near Yekaterinburg, police said. Cafe staff quickly put out the fire.
Yekaterinburg police said they have detained two suspects but dismissed any possible racial motive in the attacks, calling them hooliganism.
“They are in no way related to Beslan or any ethnic issues,” said Valery Gorelykh, spokesman for the Sverdlovsk regional police, which includes the city of Yekaterinburg.
Mikhail Matevosyan, deputy chairman of the regional Armenian association Ani-Armenia, said he has no doubt that the cafe attacks were connected to the recent terrorist attacks.
Whenever Chechen rebels score a victory over federal troops in Chechnya or commit terrorist attacks, groups of young people begin targeting Caucasus natives, he said.
“They probably think, ‘You hit us there, and we’ll hit you here,'” he said by telephone from Yekaterinburg.
He ruled out a Armenian-Azeri turf war as a possible reason for the attacks.
Elsewhere, four young men with close-cropped hair beat to death a North Korean citizen in Vladivostok the weekend after the school siege ended, Noviye Izvestia reported. Unidentified assailants painted a swastika on the gate of a Jewish cemetery in Irkutsk on the night of Sept. 6-7, the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights said.
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