Two neo-Nazis were sentenced to eight months and six months in prison respectively after being found guilty of a hate crime, according to a January 30, 2007 report by the Baltic News Service. Andris Ziedins and Romans Vilums were convicted of attacking a Rwandan national, Pierre Dusabiman, in June 2006, breaking a bottle over his head and knocking him unconscious after calling him a series of racist epithets. Originally, police investigated the attack as "hooliganism" but prosecutors later reclassified the incident as a hate crime, which is punishable in Latvia by up to ten years in prison. The Russian-language local newspaper Chas, which often takes a harshly critical stance towards the Latvian government, argued in its January 31 edition that the prison sentence was a precedent in that previous hate crimes cases have ended only in suspended sentences or convictions on lesser charges. The paper quoted the head of a local organization of Afro-Latvians as saying that police have promised to crack down on neo-Nazis after a series of recent racist attacks and that they would set up video surveillance of places were neo-Nazis are known to hang out. A January 26, 2007 report by the local news web site Novonews.lv added that over the past year, police have investigated 14 attacks on dark-skinned people in Riga. UCSJ has not been able to confirm this figure, though it should be noted that the number of racist attacks reported in Riga has significantly increased over the last two years .

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