MOSCOW, June 30 (RIA Novosti) - Three skinheads in the Urals region have been sentenced to between 21 months to ten and a half years in prison, regional prosecutors said Friday.
In August 2004, Maxim Samofalov, 18, and Yevgeny Maximov, 20, both residents of the city of Verkhnyaya Pyshma, 15 kilometers (9 miles) to north of Yekaterinburg, the Sverdlovsk Region, established an extremist group to commit ethnically motivated crimes against people from the Caucasus and Central Asia.
"Subsequently, several other residents, including Yury Timirishin, 18, who shared the ideas of so-called skinheads, joined the organization," the prosecutor's office said.
Russia has more than 140 youth extremist groups with overall membership reaching 6,000, the country's interior minister said Wednesday.
"Youth groups have become more aggressive and better organized, and some of them are under the influence of criminal organizations," said Rashid Nurgaliyev, expressing concern over extremist organizations' promotion of violence among the younger generation.
Samofalov and Maximov were detained in May 2005 on charges of committing particularly serious crimes, while other members at different times left the organization voluntarily, prosecutors said.
They circulated extremist leaflets, attacked non-Russians, and set fire to their apartments in a bid to drive them out of town. In January 2005, Samofalov and Timirshin assaulted and killed an ethnic Kyrgyz.
They were sentenced to ten and a half and nine years imprisonment, respectively.
Law-enforcement agencies have launched anti-extremism raids in 38 of Russia's 89 regions so far this year, tracking down groups believed to be behind serious crimes, including in St. Petersburg and in the southwestern region of Voronezh, both of which have acquired reputations as sites of Russia's most violent race-hate crimes.
Voronezh has seen at least seven apparently racially motivated killings of non-white foreigners over the past six years, including the murder of a Peruvian student last October.
St. Petersburg has been suffering from negative publicity over alleged neo-Nazi attacks and killings, including the killing of a student from Senegal in April and the stabbing of a nine-year-old girl of mixed Russian-African origin in early 2006.
