Russia Arrests Two Men in High-Profile Murders
Gregory L. White and Olga Padorina
Wall Street Journal
October 5, 2009
MOSCOW — Russian authorities charged two alleged neo-Nazi activists with the murders of a prominent human-rights lawyer and a journalist, in what appeared to be an unusual success in cracking a high-profile case…
Stanislav Markelov, a lawyer who had defended many victims of nationalist violence, and Anastasia Baburova, a young reporter for the opposition Novaya Gazeta newspaper, were gunned down on a downtown Moscow street in January, shortly after leaving a news conference together on one of Mr. Markelov’s latest cases. They became the latest in a series of human-rights campaigners and journalists killed in Russia. Few of those cases have been solved…
Prosecutors said the accused were Muscovites Nikita Tikhonov, about 29 years old, and Yevgenia Khasis, about 24. Lawyers for the two made little comment to reporters outside their closed arraignments Thursday, news agencies reported.
Mr. Bortnikov said they were members of radical nationalist organizations. He said they were implicated in another murder and had planned a further killing of a prominent figure whom he didn’t identify.
Mr. Markelov had been threatened and attacked in the years before his death by members of the increasingly aggressive nationalist and neo-Nazi underground. He often defended antifascist activists, who were also a subject Ms. Baburova wrote about for Novaya Gazeta.
Allegedly a member of a neo-Nazi group, Mr. Tikhonov was a suspect in a 2006 murder of an antifascist youth in Moscow. In that case, Mr. Markelov, representing the victim’s family, had pushed prosecutors to bring stiffer charges. Three assailants were convicted of “hooliganism” and other lesser crimes and sentenced to prison; Mr. Tikhonov was charged in the case but fled and was never caught.
“Tikhonov looks like a quite credible suspect,” said Galina Kozhevnikova, deputy director of SOVA, a Russian group that tracks neo-Nazi and nationalist groups. But she noted that the January murders — in which the masked killer fired point-blank on a crowded sidewalk and escaped unimpeded into the metro — seemed unusually polished for neo-Nazis.
“There aren’t professional killers among these ultra-rightists,” she said. “This killing shows the hallmarks of experience in military action.”
The leader of a nationalist group, Alexander Belov of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, described Mr. Tikhonov as “a journalist … a very responsible person and rather smart. I don’t believe he could have done this,” the Interfax news agency reported.
See also : Found: Two Double Murderers?, Roland Oliphant, Russia Profile, November 5, 2009 | Russians Gather for Unity Day Rallies, The Other Russia, November 4, 2009.
Neo-Nazis infiltrate the US military: The FULL evidence
Matt Kennard
The Comment Factory
November 5, 2009
I touched down in Tampa, Fl, on a bleak day in early March on a quest to meet Forrest Fogarty, a neo-Nazi who had served the U.S. Army for two years in Iraq. I’d been speaking to him intermittently on the phone for a couple of months but getting inside the neo-Nazi network in the United States is not easy and takes reams of arduous appeals to penetrate the walls of resistance. I’d been uniquely successful with Fogarty, a loquacious character with a compelling story, so I took a flight from New York City down to Tampa to meet him…
