Russian police target migrants after rioting
Print Edition
Russian police rounded up more than 1,600 migrants yesterday in Moscow after rioting swept through a southern neighborhood a day earlier over a fatal stabbing of a Russian many residents blame on a man from the Caucasus.
The raids came the day after demonstrators, angry over the stabbing death of an ethnic Russian man, broke into a covered vegetable market and descended on the warehouse where they believed the killer was working. They threw bottles and trash, smashed windows and turned over cars. Police detained hundreds of rioters.
Men who worked at the warehouse in Biryulyovo, a working-class neighborhood on the southern outskirts of Moscow, were marched outside by police. Dozens of people gathered at the market nearby to pledge support to the rioters, venting their anger at the migrants from the predominantly Muslim Caucasus region, whom many Russians accuse of pushing up the crime rate and taking badly needed jobs.
Some 1,200 people were detained at the market that was stormed on Sunday night by rioters after a protest over the stabbing death of an ethnic Russian man, police spokesman Alexei Shapkin said.
Another 450 were detained in northeastern Moscow, also near a vegetable market employing migrant workers.
Andrei Galiakberov, spokesman for the Moscow police, described the round-up as part of a “pre-emptive raid” and said some detainees are being investigated for possible criminal connections. Police also said they found a car full of cash and unlicensed arms.
There was no sign in Biryulyovo of the crushed watermelons and overturned cars from the night before, but the market remained closed for business.
Yegor Shcherbakov, 25, was killed in a dispute over his girlfriend with another man as the couple returned home on Thursday. Sunday’s rioters were protesting what they called impunity for the man’s supposed killer.
Police and investigators yesterday promised to find the man and bring him to justice.
Of the hundreds of suspected rioters arrested on Sunday, police kept only two in custody and fined 70 more. Dozens of officers were injured, and five were hospitalized, police said.
The filmed beating of a plainclothes policeman in Moscow spurred a crackdown on migrant workers in August.
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