The Moscow News reports:

Two ethnic Armenians have been shot in Moscow on Saturday night, Interfax reported.One of the men died, the other received injuries.In late April, a young Amernian-born man was killed by a group of youngsters in a fight at Moscow’s central Pushkinskaya metro station. 17-year-old Vagan Abramyants, a student of a Moscow university, was standing on the platform with several friends, when a group of shaved young men dressed in black attacked them, NTV channel said. The attackers looked like skinheads, members of radical nationalistic movement.The nation’s leading pollster, Yuri Levada, said hate crimes were an outgrowth of deep resentment over migrants and other foreigners who come to Russia for work or to study — some illegally and many from Central Asia, the Caucasus, and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

Shockingly little additional information is available about this attack nearly two days later, a fact which strikes La Russophobe as nearly as appalling as the killing itself. While the Kremlin is obviously not interested in actually stopping these killings, it does seem to be making progress in supressing information about them. Russia is trying to blame the killings on an anti-Russia conspiracy, as Regnum reports:

“Armenia is Russia’s only partner in the South Caucasus, and certain players in Russia want to end this friendship,” said former Deputy of the National Assembly, ex-Head of Armenian Security Service Gurgen Yegiazaryan at a press briefing on June 10. He said that crimes committed in Moscow against ethnical Armenians in the last two years are not a result of the official Russian state policy. “The Russian elite are not interested in the worsening relations with Armenia, since nationally colored crimes have a negative impact on the Russia’s own image.” Yegiazarian argued that if Russia’s President Vladimir Putin took timely and harsh measures against the so-called ‘skinheads’ the second assassination of ethnical Armenian Artur Sardaryan would not have happened.Yegiazaryan is also convinced that the so-called ‘ethnically-based crime’ is committed against people of the non-Russian ethnicity in general, although its effect is especially evident in the Armenian case. “Not a single Georgian was murdered during this period, since relations with Georgia are bad enough even without that, so it was not necessary,” he contended. On May 25, 2006 an ethnical Armenian, 19-year-old Artur Sardaryan was slaughtered on a Moscow suburb electric train. Investigators believe that the crime’s motive was ‘national hatred’. Two unidentified men stabbed the youth, which was witnessed by tens of passengers. That was not the first murder of an ethnical Armenian. On April 22, at the Moscow subway station Pushkinskaya a 17-year-old Vigen Abramyants was stabbed by a skinhead gang, according to numerous witnesses’ evidence. Four of his friends were beaten, two received injuries. In this case too, investigators presumed that the motive was ethnically based. Criminal tracking have not yet yielded results.