A video showing a gay man being raped with a bottle in Russia
surfaced this week on social media.
According to Radio
Free Europe, clips of the brutal attack were being passed around
on the mobile phone app WhatsApp.
In the video, the man, who is presented as an ethnic Uzbek, is
tortured into confessing that he's gay. The man weeps as he is
beaten, insulted, threatened with a gun and forced to sit on a
bottle.
“We made him sit on a bottle so that he repents for his sins and
comes to reason,” said a man who claims to have taken part in the
attack. “We did this to protect the dignity of Uzbeks. We live
and work here, we are in contact with people of different
nationalities. There will be no respect for us otherwise.”
The man claimed that a group of Russian vigilantes found the
victim on a social-networking website and trapped him with the
proposal of a date.
“Russian guys caught him and called us to say they had a gay
Uzbek. We then questioned him and he confessed to everything. There
were six or seven of us. The Russians told us he was a pedophile,
which he denied. But he confessed that he was gay.”
Video of a similar attack thought to have happened in the same
region emerged on Russian social media last month. It shows four
Russian men beating a transgender woman and attempting to make her
sit on a bottle.
In both cases, commenters on social media cheered the attacks.