The girl who met death at her front door

The stabbing of a nine-year-old Tajik child is the latest race-hate crime in Russia. But the police are not interested, reports Julius Strauss in St Petersburg.

20 February 2004

THE nine-year-old girl was almost at her front door when the young men pounced. Hidden by the early darkness of the long St Petersburg winter, one group began battering her father with baseball bats and knuckle-dusters.

A second turned their attention to her and her eight-year-old cousin Akobir and started beating them with clubs. The boy, blood streaming from his head, scrambled under a parked car, a move that probably saved his life.

But as Khursheda struggled, one of the skinheads took out a long-bladed knife and thrust it into the girl's chest. He pulled it out and plunged it in again and again, 11 times in all as the others looked on. Within minutes she was dead.

This week Yunus Sultanov, Khursheda's father, a 35-year-old Tajik who works as a market porter, sat on the floor in his sister's bare-walled flat, his head still bandaged, and told his story.

"I never let Khursheda out of the house alone - the streets of this city are simply too dangerous," he said. "But on that day we had been to a friend's birthday party.

"On the way home she asked if we could stop in the park to slide in the snow. We were just coming to our door when I felt a blow on my head. When I came to a couple of minutes later, the killers had run away.

"I went to my daughter. There was blood all over her clothes and I carried her into the house. As we laid her down, she breathed one last time. Then the doctors came and said she was dead."

Khursheda's murder last week, in the heart of the Tsars' beautiful capital city, made the nightly news programmes in Russia. The local governor called for the killers, whom she called "under-age scum", to face swift and harsh justice.

But within hours, the fervour of the investigating authorities began to wane. A St Petersburg police spokesman, Pavel Rayevsky, gave a flavour of the investigation to come when he told local media: "It's very strange that they would choose to stab the little girl to death and only beat the father."

He added: "It's no secret that immigrants from Tajikistan are often involved in the drugs trade."

Ten days on it seems likely that Khursheda's murder will become the latest in a long list of racist hate crimes in Russia to go unpunished.

Experts say the problem of racist attacks is growing. Only days after the murder, a Jewish cemetery in St Petersburg was desecrated with swastikas. Much of the blame, they say, lies with the police.

Yuri Vdovin, of the human rights group Citizens' Watch, said: "The police simply don't want to deal with the problem. Many of them share the same views as the thugs responsible. They sympathise."

Khalim Sultanova, 33, Yusuf Sultanov's sister, who has lived in St Petersburg for eight years, said paying bribes to the police was a way of life for the city's thousands of immigrants.

She said: "If you're legal, it's 100 roubles every time they stop you. If you're not its 500 roubles, an earful of abuse and perhaps a beating."

Vladimir Novitsky, of the International Organisation for Human Rights, said this week that in some cases the police did not even try to hide their support for the racists.

The Russian historian Vladimir Ilyushenko added: "The question is not so much what kind of skinheads we have, but what kind of police, security services and authorities we have."

Members of the darker-skinned ethnic minorities - Armenians, Azeris or Tajiks - are in constant fear every time they leave their homes.

According to interior ministry figures, there are now 15,000 active skinheads in Russia - 5,000 in Moscow and 3,500 in St Petersburg. Non-governmental experts say the figure may be twice that.

In St Petersburg alone, there have been at least three recent ethnically motivated murders attributed to the skinheads including that of a six-year-old Roma girl.

A witness to one attack was threatened by skinheads. When she turned to the police for help, local human rights organisations say they warned her that she would be charged with spreading false rumours if she persisted. She has since gone into hiding.

Anti-minority sentiment has worsened since the bomb attack on the Moscow metro a fortnight ago, which killed 41 commuters. Authorities blamed Chechen terrorists.

An Amnesty International report issued yesterday complained of systematic abuse of Chechens and other minorities by the authorities. Even more shocking, in a poll, 20 per cent of residents of St Petersburg said they "understood" the murder of Khursheda.

As for the Sultanov family, their dream of a better life in Russia is now over. They plan to leave the tiny, shabby flat and go back to Tajikistan. "I should have never come here," said Yunus. "But I had to feed my family and there was no work to be had.

"Here I could earn 200 roubles a day in the market and I hoped one day to buy a flat back home with the proceeds. But it's all over now."

Nazar Mirzada, a friend and representative of the 6,000 Tajiks in St Petersburg, said: "I don't understand it. We all find our own jobs and most of us do the worst, dirtiest work there is. Why do they want to kill us?"

But more haunting than the desperate words of the grown-ups were the eyes of the little boy, Akobir, flitting around the room nervously as he sat next to his Uncle Yunus.

When he returned home from the hospital, his aunt, Khursheda's mother, distraught with grief, unfairly scolded him for failing to protect Khursheda. "Why did you run away, why didn't you defend her?" she cried at him in scenes that were captured on Russian television.

Now he was anxious to please. "I saw them," he said. "But then I closed my eyes." Then he looked guiltily towards the grown-ups.