The Associated Press reports on yet more outrageous racist atrocities in the Russian capital, now in the form of racist wolf pack activity, made even worse by more attempts to fob them off as "hooliganism":

Prosecutors said Monday that they are investigating the weekend stabbings of five ethnic minorities in Moscow as hate crimes. Four ethnic Armenians and one Azerbaijani were attacked by about 15 assailants at a subway station Saturday, said Sergei Marchenko, a spokesman for the Moscow prosecutor's office.

The office initially said only two people were hurt in the attack and that it was being investigated as "hooliganism," not a hate crime.

Russia has seen a wave of hate crimes in recent years, with hundreds of attacks reported, including many on dark-skinned immigrants from former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus Mountains region. Rights activists say hate groups are emboldened by authorities' mild approach to prosecuting hate crimes, with neo-Nazi and extremist literature sold freely. Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian condemned the attacks and urged Russia to do more to head off a rising tide of violent xenophobia. "This is a widespread and continuing phenomenon in Russia," Oskanian said. "The Russian authorities need to take serious steps to thwart it, otherwise such incidents will be a serious threat to Russia itself."

Meanwhile, three suspects in the Saturday stabbing of a Kazakh citizen were arrested for a racially motivated crime, the Interfax news agency reported. Also Saturday, two Uzbek citizens were hospitalized with multiple stab wounds after being attacked in southwest Moscow, Interfax said. Alexander Brod, who heads the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, said the surge in attacks might be tied to two high-profile conferences that opened in the capital on Monday before a summit of the Group of Eight major industrialized nations that begins next week in St. Petersburg. "On the eve of two such important events, it's quite possible that Moscow's nationalist radicals demonstrated their aggressiveness to announce their presence," Brod told The Associated Press. Interfax quoted an Armenian community leader, Ara Abramian, as saying the attacks were "a direct provocation before the G-8 meeting," and sharply criticized Moscow law enforcement for failing to prevent such assaults. "I can't understand how big groups of skinheads can walk around the Moscow metro and freely attack people with (knives) in the center of Moscow in broad daylight," he said.