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Russian youths admit race-hate murders

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MOSCOW, October 1 (RIA Novosti) - Two 18-year-old ringleaders of a Moscow far-right gang charged with 20 murders pleaded guilty on Wednesday to race-hate killings.

The gang killed their non-white victims and assaulted 12 others in a series of attacks between August 2006 and October 2007. The suspects reportedly filmed some of the attacks and posted them on the Internet.

Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, on trial in the Moscow City Court on Wednesday, were both arrested in mid-April. Ryno initially said he had killed 37 people, but later withdrew his statement.

Three other gang members - Vitaly Nikitin, Nikolai Dagayev and Roman Kuzin - have also pleaded guilty to the charges, while Denis Lavrinenkov and Svetlana Avakumova protest their innocence. Most of the accused were under 18 at the time of the attacks.

The Moscow City Court last month sentenced 13 members of another race-hate group, accused of two murders and 10 assaults, to between three and 10 years in prison.

Russia has seen a wave of racially motivated crimes since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Routine attacks by skinheads and gangs of youths on foreigners and people with non-Slavic features are a regular occurrence in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as the city of Voronezh, which hosts many foreign university students

More than 70 people have been killed and some 300 injured in ethnically motivated violence in Russia so far this year.

Teenage ultra-nationalist gangs are widely believed to have been responsible for the murders of up to 50 non-whites in Moscow in 2007.

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