Crime

Russia: Neo-nazi gang subject student to homophobic and racist torture

Nov 06 2013
Written by Rudy Katoch

A video allegedly showing a South African student in Russia reportedly being tortured in a homophobic and racist fashion by an alleged neo-Nazi gang has been published online.

The video was posted to Russian social media website VK by the group Occupy Belgorod yesterday.

It shows the boy being asked to have sex with a cat and having a line shaved down his head. He’s then forced to paint it green.

He is also made to kiss a watermelon, which is smashed in his face. The gang then made the boy simulate oral sex on a beer bottle and he was pressured into saying racial epithets in Russian.

According to Occupy Belgorod, the young man was expelled from Shukhov State Technological University following the incident.

Yuri Zigunov, an alleged member of the Belgorod contingent of Occupy-Pedofilyay, posted a video of the student on VK.com, the second largest social networking site in Europe that is popular with Russian-speaking users.

Zigunov writes: “A pleasant piece of news, another life ruined”. He goes on to claim that the student was expelled from university.

Occupy-Pedofilyay sets traps online for young men and posts videos of the hate crimes.

In Belgorod, a city near Russia’s border with Ukraine, anti-gay activists claim to have posed as a 15-year old boy to lure the young man to an apartment.

The Russian LGBT Network said the anti-gay “propaganda” laws passed in June has validated right-wing groups who use social media to “ambush” gay people, by luring them into meetings and then assaulting them on camera.

In October, the Sova Center, a Russian group that tracks nationalism and xenophobia, reported that 20 people were injured in racist and neo-Nazi attacks, two of them fatally. Since the beginning of 2013, racist violence has killed 18 people in Russia and injured 141.