'Allah Akbar!' graffiti appeared in Moscow subway

Russian media outlets report that graffiti "Allah Akbar" ("Allah is Great!") and "Death to Russians!" appeared on the southern wall in the hall of Planernaya subway station. Police is trying to find the authors of these inscriptions, the Interfax news agency reports.

Russian press writes that xenophobic mood in the city have been intensified after the subway bombings.

A woman, who allegedly saw young people who wrote these words on the wall, reported the incident to police. According to her testimony, four young people made these inscriptions with cans of paint on Saturday night. She told that they were natives of the Caucasus.

Searching for graffiti authors on the wall in the subway station is difficult because there isn't a single camera in the station hall, the Russian terrorist police laments.

Meanwhile, foreign media outlets write that fear of the people who came from the Caucasus, or just Muslims, is growing in Russia due to recent subway blasts.

"They fear those whom the "white" Russians call the "darks": Muslim women are considered to be potential terrorists", the Swiss newspaper Tribune de Geneve writes. Police stops for strip-search only Russian citizens of Caucasian origin, "who are easily recognizable by a dark skin, thick hair and eyebrows, and women by headscarfs".

According to another Swiss paper, Le Temps, the Caucasian type of appearance becomes tantamount for a charge in a crime. Muslims and natives of the Caucasus are afraid of becoming victims of xenophobia. A parishioner in the Moscow mosque in Zamoskvorechye said that he was afraid to let his wife to the street, because she wears headscarf. "I think everyone looks at her", the man said.

In this situation, as the paper writes, ultra-national movements are particularly active, using the situation and people's fears for their own purposes. The KGB-sponsored neo-Nazi Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) supports "cleaning" Moscow and the areas nearby from immigrants from the Caucasus under the pretext of "treatment against the Islamist infection".

Department of Monitoring,
Kavkaz Center

Source: Kavkaz Center.
Link: http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2010/04/05/11788.shtml.