Two convicted for racist murders

MOSCOW (AP):

A court has convicted two Russian men of racially motivated murders. The Moscow City Court yesterday found Vasily Krivets, 22, guilty of 15 hate killings in 2007-2008 and gave him a life sentence. It convicted the 23-year-old Dmitry Ufimtsev of five murders in the same period and sentenced him to 22 years in prison.

The two men were members of the White Wolves, a skinhead group that officials say was responsible for more than 30 killings. Hate crimes, often targeting dark-skinned people from Caucasus and Central Asia, have been common in Russia. They peaked in 2008, when 110 were killed and 487 wounded, an independent watchdog says. The Moscow Bureau for Human Rights estimates 70,000 neo-Nazis were active in Russia, compared with just a few thousand in the early 1990s.