The Novosibirsk regional court handed down one guilty and three not
guilty verdicts in a trial of four neo-Nazis charged with murder
motivated by ethnic hatred, according to a June 26, 2009 report by the
regions.ru news web site. On January 12, 2008 the four defendants and
other as yet unidentified youths left a restaurant and encountered a
citizen of Turkey, Fatikh Essen, who worked in the city as a
construction worker. The court determined that Roman Lyuborets, AKA
"Jackal", killed Mr. Essen with a baseball bat and sentenced him to
seven years in prison, and that his comrades then loudly celebrated
his accomplishment on the street, bragging that he now had earned the
right to wear white shoelaces, thus marking him as a neo-Nazi who has
killed an ethnic minority. One of the neo-Nazis filmed the attack on a
cell phone and posted it on far-right web sites, complete with
swastikas and neo-Nazi slogans. The video shows that several people
participated in the deadly assault, but it is of such poor quality
that the assailants' faces cannot be clearly identified. The court
therefore excluded the video from evidence and found the other three
defendants not guilty. It is not clear from the report if the
prosecution or Mr. Lyuborets' lawyers intend to appeal the verdict.
