Three neo-Nazis damaged homes being constructed by Crimean Tatars in Simferopol, Ukraine (Republic of Crimea), according to an April 27, 2007 report in the local newspaper Golos Kryma. The incident took place on April 20, which perhaps coincidentally is Adolf Hitler’s birthday—traditionally a time of increased neo-Nazi violence. The three youths damaged eight homes before they were chased off by Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group that was deported en mass by Stalin in 1944 and only allowed to return to their homeland after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Tatars caught one of the youths and turned him over to the police. According to two witnesses quoted in the article, the young man had two swastika emblems on his clothes, along with another on his backpack. Despite this, and despite the timing of the incident, local police refuse to admit the possibility that the youths are neo-Nazis.

“Information that skinheads were involved in this incident has not been confirmed,” the regional police’s spokesman Aleksandr Dombrovsky was quoted as saying, echoing comments made by local police officials in the wake of a 2005 neo-Nazi attack on Jewish children and subsequent clashes between ethnic Russian and Crimean Tatar youths.

According to the article, the two neo-Nazis who escaped the Tatars may have been invovled in a subsequent attack on Indian medical students, the second such incident in the last two months in Simferopol.

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