Six skinheads in Ivanovo have been sentenced under a rarely applied hate crime law for the murder of a Bangladeshi student and related assaults, according to a June 3, 2003 article in the local newspaper Khronometr. The March 2002 attacks, which resulted in the death of a 25 year old student from Bangladesh named Akhmad Sheykh Kamal Uddin and the beating of three other foreign students, received international publicity when Amnesty International featured the incident in a March 2003 report on discrimination in Russia.

According to the article, on March 10, 2002 a group of around 20 skinheads decided to celebrate on of their comrade’s birthdays by “beating some blacks”—i.e. hunting down dark-skinned foreign students. They found their first victims on Prospekt Engelsa—a male Indian student at the Chemical University and a female student from Mongolia. Yelling “Sieg Heil!”, the neo-Nazis took turns kicking the Indian student as he lay on the ground; the Mongolian woman was punched in the face and pushed aside.

Later that evening, the skinheads spotted three Bangladeshi students on Ryabinina Street. One managed to escape, another was severely beaten (he spent 15 days in the hospital and subsequently left Russia), and Mr. Uddin ended up in a coma, dying two months later in the hospital. v The author of the article implicitly criticized the police by pointing out that 15 of the attackers were never caught. One of the six eventually put on trial has a swastika tattoo, while another was found to be in possession of leaflets reading “Darkies (tsvetnye), get out of the city!” The court found two of the accused guilty of the murder itself and sentenced them to five years and four years, three months respectively. The other four got two and a half, two, two and one and a half years. Since all are under-aged, their sentences will be served in a juvenile facility. All the suspects were charged under a very rarely applied law prohibiting “group hooliganism committed on the grounds of racial hatred.”

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