Jun. 5, 2013 (TSR) – Russian investigators have opened a criminal case against three residents of Ust-Bolsheretsky district of Kamchatka, who are suspected of murdering a deputy director of the airport “Ozernaya”, according to the Ministry of Interior.
The criminal police arrested 21-year-old employee of the local fish-processing company on suspicion of murder of the 39-year-old deputy director of the airport who was killed “for his untraditional sexual orientation.”
On May 30, at 12 pm on the banks of Ozernaya River, two kilometers from the village Zaporozhye Bolsheretsky district Kamchatka region, police found a burned car where the man’s body was found inside.
According to the press service for the Investigations Department of the Investigations Committee for the Kamchatka Territory, the murdered man lived in the same village as the suspects.
The Russian Operational-search activities revealed that two men had a conflict in which the main suspect who struck the victim with a knife. The perpetrators inflicted numerous bodily injuries on the man with their knife and feet.
To hide evidence and cover up the crime, the suspects then put the body in their car, poured gasoline on it, and set fire to it in which there was the body of the deceased.
In the car there was a man’s body. His identity is established, it was 39-year-old owner of the car, the deputy director of the airport “Ozernaya”.
More investigation is being carried out; all the circumstances of the incident are being set.
The incident happened weeks after a battered body of an unidentified 23-year-old man, found on the morning of May 10, was killed in the southwestern city of Volgograd for being gay.
A spokeswoman for the Volgograd office of the Investigative Committee said on May 12 that two men, aged 22 and 27, have been arrested in connection with the attack.
According to investigators, the 23-year-old victim had been drinking with the two men to celebrate Victory Day on May 9 when he told them he was gay.
The two men then allegedly beat him, sodomized him with a beer bottle, and smashed in his skull with a stone.
Activists in Russia say it is rare for officials to specify homophobia as the motive for a crime.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) persons in the Russian Federation are ensured the full protection under state constitution, although the traditional definition of marriage has been upheld.
As of 2008 (when Men who have sex with men were finally allowed to donate blood), Russia has no criminal law on federal level directed at LGBT people, but since male homosexual acts were decriminalized in 1993, there are no laws protecting against discrimination or harassment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Local legislatures legislatively have prohibited “propaganda of homosexuality” among minors and established fines for that administrative offense.
In June 2012, Moscow courts enacted a hundred-year ban on gay pride parades.
Recently, the secretary-general of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland, demanded that Russia, as a signatory, must allow LGBT rallies and that it should protect the rights of citizens wishing to hold public rallies.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will ban foreign homosexual couples from adopting Russian children, the government has confirmed.
