Race Murderers Get 39 Years After Retrial

By Ali Nassor

Special to The St. Petersburg Times

Published: June 22, 2007 (Issue # 1282)

A 20-month jury trial rocked by judicial flaws that initially led to acquittals, prompting public condemnation and a retrial, ended Tuesday with the St. Petersburg City Court sentencing four white supremacists a total of 39 years in jail for murder.

The court sentenced Andrei Gerasimov to 14 years in a high security prison for masterminding and taking part in the killing of 29-year-old Congolese student Roland Epassak in September 2005. Viktor Orlov, the youngest culprit in the group aged between 19 and 26, was sentenced to 7 years in jail, while Andrei Olenov and Yury Gromov will each serve a 9-year term.

The group’s defense lawyers said they will file an appeal against the verdict with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if an appeal lodged in the Russian Supreme Court is rejected.

After sentencing was passed a small picket of discontented nationalists, and friends and relatives of the convicted men gathered outside the court building on the Moika embankment waving placards “Shame to Fascist Prosecutors!” and “It Could be You in Their Place!”

The 20-strong crowd was led by Yury Belyayev, leader of the extreme nationalist Freedom Party which was outlawed in 2004, who is currently serving an 18-month suspended sentence for promoting hate.

“They [nationalists] have been dealt with a serious blow today,” said Ruslan Linkov, head of the Democratic Russia human rights movement.

“But in the meantime anything should be expected of the wounded wild animals they are.”

Linkov reminded people of non-Slavic appearance and their Russian sympathizers to the watchful of nationalist reaction to the case.

Tuesday’s sentencing followed a guilty verdict issued last Thursday by a panel of a dozen jurors who voted 10/2, a week after the prosecution and the defense had delivered final statements.

It was the end of a retrial that had been ongoing since February, following the original trial in July in which the suspects were acquitted by a jury that was branded “inefficient” by human rights advocates and high profile politicians.

“I took the case under my own patronage, followed it closely and the prosecutors did an excellent job proving guilt beyond any doubt; yet a bunch of inefficient, semi-literate jurors let the criminals go!” Governor, Valentina Matviyenko said in response to the public outcry against the acquittal last year.

The Supreme Court overturned the ruling and ordered a retrial.

“Such verdicts are counter-productive in relation to the war on xenophobia and extremism,” said Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, condemning courts acquittals in all three jury trials for hate murders in St. Petersburg last year.

Gryzlov was referring to the trial of suspects in the murder of 9-year-old Tajik girl Khursheda Sultanova in February 2004 under the charge of “hooliganism” which resulted in suspended sentences for those accused of the slaying.

A day after that killing, Neo-Nazis stabbed 9-year-old African-Russian girl Lillian Sisoko in the throat on the doorstep of her apartment building in downtown St. Petersburg.

Gryzlov was also referring to the dropping of hate crime charges against the killers of Vietnamese student Vu An-Tuan in October 2004 resulting in a conviction on lesser charges and light sentences.

The retrial in the Epassak case had a new jury and also heard fresh evidence and new witnesses.

They included witness testimonies by two of Epassak’s compatriots who were with him minutes before the assault and the Russian girlfriend he was going to meet when he was attacked in the courtyard of a building on 8 Prospekt Nauki. The evidence also included video footage of the attack from a closed circuit camera on a nearby building.

The retrial was not without its hitches, however. The new jury had one of its members disqualified for allegedly having a criminal record.

Epassak’s murder was the first in what would become a wave of violent hate crimes to hit St. Petersburg in which nine people were killed and several others hospitalized within the space of a year. Although most of the victims were members of the African community, the city’s smallest minority group, others in the spree included a Russian anti-fascist activist Timur Kachareva, a student at the St. Petersburg State University, Indian medical student Nitesh Kumar Singh and two women from the Caucuses and Central Asia.