Officials in Russia's Far East are
holding 3 men they suspect of killing an airport manager because he
was gay.
The 39-year-old victim was the local
deputy director of Ozyornaya airport. His body was found in his
burned-out car on Thursday.
Officials have accused three men from a
village on the Kamchatka peninsula of stabbing and trampling the man
to death.
“In order to cover-up the crime, the
suspects put his body inside his car, poured gasoline over it and set
[it] on fire,” the regional branch of the Investigative Committee
said in a statement on Monday.
Last month, police accused two men from
the southern city of Volgograd of murdering a 23-year-old man after
he came out gay to them. The victim, Vladislav Tornovoi, allegedly
was beaten and sodomized with a beer bottle, and his skull was
smashed with a stone. His naked body was found in the courtyard of
an apartment building.
Nikolai Alexeyev, a gay rights
activist, told the Moscow
Times that a proposed bill which seeks to outlaw “homosexual
propaganda” would give homophobes carte blanche to carry out such
attacks.