Evgeniya Tamarchenko, an eye-witness to what happened, informed PRIMA that she had got onto the train with her husband at almost the same time as the skinheads. The teenagers occupied three compartments and after they swooped on one of the Caucasians who was sitting in a seat the sound of breaking glass was heard. Eye-witnesses, afraid that the person who had been thrown out had died, got off at the next station, Chukhlinka, and went along the platform. They could not find a body, however they heard one of the grown men who was accompanying the teenagers say to another, “We killed him, we checked”. The couple got off at Karacharovo and told a guard on the platform what had happened. They then called the Moscow emergency services. When they got home they dialed 02. However, the police said that they knew nothing about what had happened, and as a whole did not want to know.

Today I tried to find something out about this incident from the police. At Kuskovo station the duty officer from the local police station, Shorikov, said that there was no record about people being beaten up on a train the previous day in the duty officers’ log. When he heard that the people who had been beaten up were probably Azerbaijanis he was genuinely amazed: “Why are you worried about this?” he said.

Neither the duty officer for Moscow at the city Department of Internal Affairs, who was simply called Ivan, nor the duty officer for the Moscow Transport Police Department, Sergei Lobarev, wanted to discuss this matter at all. Only the Moscow emergency service would confirm that there had been a call from Evgeniya Tamarchenko and the information had been passed to the police.

This was not the first such incident to have occurred on local trains heading down town on this section of the network. On the 12 May several teenagers on a local train out of Kurskovo station in Moscow savagely beat up the head of an Organization for Tadziks living in Moscow, Bokhsho Lashkarbekov, and two of his companions. This occurred in the vicinity of Kuskovo station. At five o’clock in the evening, Bokhsho Lashkarbekov, his son, Mavlodot, and Asadbek Asadbekov, a postgraduate student from the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Science, were returning to Reutov from a cultural event for the Tadzik community in Moscow. About 30 youths above school leaving age entered the compartment. They surrounded the Tadziks and began to kick them. According to Bokhsho Lashkarbekov while doing this they shouted “Moscow for the Muscovites” and “Russia for the Russians”. Bokhsho Lashkarbekov suffered a broken rib, his son suffered facial injuries and Asadbek Asadbekov received multiple scratches. As soon as the skinheads had left the compartment the victims of the attack called their friends who informed the railway police about the attack. However the police, although contacting Lashkarbekov by phone, did not come to the compartment.

The duty officer at the Kurskovo station department of internal affairs at the time informed PRIMA’s correspondent, who was trying to ascertain whether any of the hooligans had been arrested, that he knew nothing about the incident. They still do not know anything to this day.
One and half years elapsed between these two incidents, both of which displayed very similar characteristics; several dozen youths operating along one particular section of the line get on and off trains, find victims, beat them up and cross to the other side of the platform, board a train and escape. Another coincidence, without doubt beyond the skinheads’ control, but which is essential for them to carry out their actions, is the inaction of the police. Nobody knows anything, no records have been made, “there is nothing we can do”. And what about the amazement of the duty officer at my words that the people who had been beaten up were probably Azerbaidzanis: “Why are you worried about this?”

But really we must be worried about this in a city where the only pre-election argument of Herman Sterligov, a candidate for the post of Mayor, is that over the last decade the Azerbaijani diaspora in Moscow has grown by several times. There is no need for any kind of commentary. It should be clear to everyone. These pre-election leaflets are now posted up in train compartments on the underground.