MOSCOW, October 14 (RIA Novosti) – A female member of a notorious far-right group that targets people it identifies as pedophiles and gays and subjects them to degrading abuse, has been fatally stabbed in Russia’s republic of Tatarstan, reports said Monday.
The body of Yelena Gorbushkova, 30, was found in the local city of Naberezhnye Chelny on Sunday. She had been stabbed more than 20 times, including to the face and neck, Chelny-Izvest.ru local news website said.
The woman worked as a private guard at a local mall, and was a far-right activist in her spare time, the report said.
Gorbushkova, known as “Alyona SS,” also had a 10-year-old daughter, Moskovsky Komsomolets daily said.
A 27-year-old local welder pleaded guilty to the attack, the Investigative Committee’s local branch said in a statement Monday.
The statement gave no further details and cited no motive for the murder. However, a source at the Committee told RIA Novosti, on condition of anonymity, that the suspect was a local activist involved in the far-right “pedophile hunter” group Occupy-Pedofilyai.
The group’s Naberezhnye Chelny branch saw a series of defections last year, when members left to join the nationalist Russian All-People’s Union party. There have since been street clashes between the two groups, the source said, with those who left, including Gorbushkova, also being accused of being police informants.
Occupy-Pedofilyai was founded by Maxim Martsinkevich, a former neo-Nazi skinhead and active nationalist who has served two prison terms for race-hate crimes.
The group targets alleged child abusers, setting up fake online profiles of minors advertising for paid sex to lure offenders out on “dates.”
The suspects are then interrogated on camera, as well as threatened, beaten up and, in many cases, doused with or made to drink urine.
Martsinkevich, 29, told Lenta.ru news website last year that he charged people a fee to take part in these child abuser-hunting “safaris.”
The group was also reported to have targeted teen gays, subjecting them to similar kinds of abuse.
Occupy-Pedofilyai has to date largely avoided police attention, which critics blame on victims’ reluctance to come forward. However, Sverdlovsk Region police searched the apartments of several group activists in the Urals in August, seizing weapons including axes, knives, nunchaku and shuriken.
Vigilante nationalism was again in the media spotlight in Russia last weekend, when a crowd of at least 1,000, including ultranationalists, rioted in Moscow over a murder they blamed on migrant workers.
Similar riots have taken place in recent years in several other regions in Russia, which is estimated to have at least 3 million illegal migrants, including many from the impoverished ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, who do not need visas to enter Russia.
