MOSCOW, July 13 (RIA Novosti) – Three labor migrants from Uzbekistan were killed in southern Russia after a brawl in a café, their burned-down bodies found in a quarry, police said Saturday.
One of the two suspected killers was arrested in the village of Nizhne-Bakanskaya in the Krasnodar region and confessed to murdering the Uzbek men aged 24, 30 and 41, police said.
The killing took place on June 24 after a drunken brawl at the Tequila Boom café, it said. Although the migrants ran away from the site, the suspected killers caught and tied up one of them, prompting the other two to return, it said in a statement.
Millions of labor migrants from impoverished ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia have flooded Russia since the early 2000s despite growing xenophobia, hate attacks and abuse.
Many average Russians accuse the Central Asians – along with natives of Russia’s Caucasus region – of stealing their jobs, forming ethnic gangs and disrespecting Russian traditions.
Human rights groups and community leaders say Russian employers, officials and police routinely abuse the migrants by withholding or denying their pay, extorting bribes and subjecting them to beatings, humiliation and other abuses.
Polls show that nearly half of Russians dislike migrants from Central Asia and Russia's Caucasus.
Hate crimes against migrants peaked in 2008, when 110 were killed and 487 wounded, often by gangs of mostly underage ultranationalists and neo-Nazis, the Sova Center rights group said.
Several dozen neo-Nazis have been convicted and sentenced to long prison terms in recent years.
