ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — It was his birthday, and as usual, Yunus Sultanov's 8-year-old daughter, Khursheda, was full of fun. Why didn't they go get her young cousin, she said, and have a proper party?
So they picked up 8-year-old Akobir, and were making their way back home when a group of youths rushed up behind them. Sultanov, a native of Tajikistan, was pounded senseless. Akobir was hit several times, but managed to crawl under a car.
He was the one who heard Khursheda screaming as the men began stabbing her.
"She was crying and shouting, 'Daddy, please help me,' " Akobir recalled Tuesday, his thin face still bruised and scratched. The girl lived only as long as it took her father to carry her upstairs and present her, bleeding from 11 stab wounds, to his wife.
A few days after the Feb. 9 attack, a revolutionary war memorial -- in a city that underwent a legendary siege during World War II at the hands of the German Nazis -- was defaced with swastikas. And on Saturday, dozens of Jewish graves were spray-painted with the symbol.
"It seems things are getting out of control, and for us, it's getting very scary," Pewzner Menachem-Mendel, the chief rabbi of St. Petersburg, said in an interview.
Ethnic violence is nothing new to Russia, but human rights officials say there are signs that the nation is in for a troubling new wave of hate crimes -- particularly against Central Asians and darker-skinned people from the Caucasus region -- in the wake of the Feb. 6 explosion on a Moscow subway that was attributed to Chechen militants.
Chechens have been hauled in to police stations, questioned and fingerprinted by the dozens, and residents of the former Soviet republics surrounding Chechnya say they are routinely stopped and harassed for bribes by police on the street. Many Chechens have been suddenly evicted from their apartments by landlords who don't want trouble with the authorities.
"Chechens in Moscow every day are reminded by the police, by officials, by bureaucrats, by ordinary people, that they are enemies," said Salambek Maigov, a Chechen businessman who once represented the government of former Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov in Moscow.
"Chechens can't get work in Moscow. They can't get a room at hotels, they can't rent apartments in private houses anymore.... It is becoming clearer and clearer that Russia needs Chechnya, but it doesn't need us, Chechens."
