Twelve people, including four children, were killed at a holiday gathering here last month. Almost all of them were stabbed or strangled and then set on fire. The community’s distress at the brutality was compounded when investigators said that the suspects in the killings were members of a local gang that had sown terror here, unchecked, for years and, worse, had forged close relationships with the local government. Some of the suspects were even current or former elected officials.
As a result of the killings, Kushchevskaya has become a symbol of the epidemic of lawlessness in provincial Russia, a problem rooted in the collusion of bandits and corrupt bureaucrats.
“With every passing day it becomes more and more clear that the fusion of government and criminals, what is now called the Kushchevskaya model, is not unique,” Valery D. Zorkin, the chairman of Russia’s Constitutional Court, wrote in an opinion article on Friday in the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta. Should the situation continue, he said, “our citizens will become divided between predators, free in the criminal jungle, and subhumans, conscious that they are only prey.”
Such corruption has never been secret, but since the killings the problem has moved from mere kitchen-table conversations to the level of national discourse. President Dmitri A. Medvedevhis annual state of the nation speech last month when he warned local law enforcement officials not “to hide in offices and observe as criminals grow and become insolent on their territories.” acknowledged it in
“Unfortunately, there have been a series of tragic events in which our citizens have died or were killed,” he said. “The reasons for this include laxity in the activities of law enforcement and other government agencies and, frequently, their direct merger with criminals.”
The discussion has been picked up in the national media, including on each of the major government-controlled television channels, which have broadcast frequent updates as well as special reports about the Kushchevskaya killings.
Uncomfortable questions have also been raised about the viability of the system of consolidated power built over the past decade by Russia’s paramount leader, Vladimir V. Putin, now the prime minister. Senior authorities, Mr. Putin included, have explained restrictions on the media and on political freedoms as necessary to restore order in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the chaos that followed. While Mr. Putin has largely brought Russia’s upper echelons to heel, many of the far-flung regions remain out of Moscow’s control.
Kushchevskaya, which is about 700 miles from the capital amid the undulating, fertile fields of the Russian south, has a long history of freewheeling banditry. A kind of Russian Dodge City, it was founded by Cossack horsemen in 1794 as a frontier settlement. The Cossacks eventually submitted to the Soviet commissars, who built collective farms here that fed the nation. With the collapse of the Communist regime, a frontier lawlessness re-emerged in the race to control the region’s agricultural bounty.
It was in this setting that the gang suspected of committing the Kushchevskaya murders was born. Led by Sergei Tsapok, a businessman and a onetime member of the town’s legislature, the band has spent nearly a decade plundering, raping and murdering with impunity, often with the aid, tacit or otherwise, of local and regional officials, according to prosecutors and witnesses.
Mr. Tsapok, now in jail in connection with the 12 killings, is from the wealthy family that owns Arteks Agro, one of the region’s largest and most profitable agricultural concerns. Kushchevskaya’s residents spoke of Mr. Tsapok as the unchallenged authority in town, backed by a group of several dozen young men whom everyone knew but no one dared cross.
“Just the name Tsapok provoked fear,” said Galina V. Bukhanenko, 64, who was selling hats at the town market.
Residents said the gang’s members kept the town and its 35,000 people in a state of anxiety.
“Once, three of these guys got into my cab and put a screwdriver to my ribs and made me drive around all night,” said a 54-year-old taxi driver who would not give his name because he feared for his safety. “In the morning they didn’t even say thank you.” Another time, he said, they used a gun.
Complaints to the police were often rebuffed or met with further harassment, the driver and others said.
Olga A. Kutovaya, the editor in chief of the local newspaper, Vperyod, said she had held public round tables at which officials were pelted with questions about the group’s flagrant criminality.
“The answers were always the same: ‘There are no criminal groups here,’ ” she said.
Exactly how Server Ametov, a successful farmer, ran afoul of Mr. Tsapok is unclear. Investigators have suggested that a business dispute, or perhaps a desire for revenge, provoked the gang to kill him and 11 others early on Nov. 5.
Mr. Tsapok’s older brother, Nikolai, had been killed in 2002, and there had been talk that Mr. Ametov was involved.
The viciousness of the latest killings surprised even this violence-weary community. In addition to Mr. Ametov, his wife, Galina, and daughter-in-law Yelena were killed, as were several neighbors and out-of-town guests who had gathered to celebrate People’s Unity Day, which marks the liberation of Moscow from Polish troops in 1612. Two of the children who were killed had not celebrated their first birthdays, and other victims were 5 and 14.
At least 10 members of the gang, including Mr. Tsapok, were arrested after federal detectives arrived from Moscow to take over the investigation. Several other suspects were still being sought.
As the suspects were interrogated, investigators uncovered dozens of other crimes that they said were linked to the gang. Prosecutors have opened investigations into at least 10 unsolved murders, as well as kidnappings, robberies and at least 25 rapes. The police were also looking into whether Arteks Agro, which is owned by Mr. Tsapok’s mother, had used Ukrainians as slave laborers.
Local officials either ignored or profited from the lawlessness, said investigators, who have found at least 242 crimes that they said local law enforcement agencies had covered up.
One police official, Aleksandr Khodych, the leader of the local antiextremism department, appears to have been jailed. Others have been fired, including the Krasnodar region’s police chief and prosecutor.
The case has inspired people in other towns to speak out. In Gus-Khrustalny, east of Moscow, residents sent a letter to Mr. Putin complaining that government-backed criminal gangs had been terrorizing businessmen. The police are investigating.
In Kushchevskaya, the national attention has given some residents hope that the worst might be over.
“This is of course a tragedy, a terrible tragedy for everyone,” said Oleg I. Petrakin, a farmer. “But with this tragedy we know that everything will go back to normal. This chaos cannot last forever.”
No comments:
Post a Comment