More questions were raised on Wednesday about a shocking internet video that shows Russian neo-Nazis beheading one man and shooting another, as police probed its origin and authenticity.
The video, which surfaced on Sunday in online diaries on Livejournal.com, appears to show a pair of masked men executing a Tadjik national and an ethnic Dagestani man in a forest with a Nazi flag in the background.
The mystery of its origins deepened as Russian law-enforcement agencies continued to analyse the video and consulted with foreign partners in countries whose computer servers had hosted the file.
A police official in the southern region of Adygea told the RIA Novosti news agency that a student had turned himself into police, claiming that ”he is a follower of national socialist ideas and has spent two years spreading material on the internet meant to incite ethnic hatred, including the video”.
But who may have committed the murders — if the video proves to be authentic — only grew cloudier three days after footage first appeared.
A superimposed title refers to ”the arrest and execution of two colonists from Dagestan and Tajikistan by the National-Socialist Party of Rus” — an ancient name for Russia. It then shows a masked man beheading one of the bound and gagged captives with a large knife and shooting the other in the head.
The previously unknown group circulated a statement online late on Tuesday, declaring ”the start of our party’s armed struggle against coloured colonists and the Russian bureaucrats who support them”. It referred to itself as ”the military wing” of Russia’s National-Socialist Society (NSS), a Moscow-based neo-Nazi organisation.
The NSS denied there was any such wing, but added: ”We acknowledge that any autonomous national socialist group could certainly have committed the execution … shown in the video.”
”It would be an entirely predictable reaction to continuing pressure on national socialist movements from the authorities,” it said in a statement.
While state-controlled television kept silent about the story, speculation raged in print and internet media about whether the video and statement could be an initiative by secret services or a rival neo-Nazi group meant to bring down the NSS.
”Though there are some odd moments in the video; it seems clear that the two people in it were actually killed,” said Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the xenophobia monitoring centre Sova, in an online interview at NewTimes.ru. ”It looks less like a secret services operation than an attempt by other neo-Nazis to set up [NSS leader] Dmitry Rumyantsev,” he said.
Sova’s monitoring indicates that membership in neo-Nazi groups has surged in recent years in Russia, as have attacks on people of Caucasian and Central Asian origin.
According to Sova, 280 people have been the victims of racist attacks in Russia this year, including 34 deaths — a 21% rise over the same period in 2006.
In July, police arrested a Russian neo-Nazi leader who had created a website with videos of attacks on foreigners that was popular among Russian skinheads.
The video of the purported execution has been removed from Livejournal.com, but was still being circulated in Russian-language neo-Nazi forums on Wednesday. — Sapa-AFP