Cossacks suspected of desecrating a Crimean Muslim Cemetery

Police suspect people linked with the Cossack unit “Sobol” to be behind the major attack on a Muslim Cemetery of the Nizhnyohirske settlement in the Crimea.  This was announced on Tuesday during a press conference given by the Minister of Internal Affairs Yury Lutsenko in Simferopol.

Yury Lutsenko said that some of the suspects were implicated in other crimes as well.

“It is extremely difficult to prove guilt. They were there (in the settlement where the attack took place0 anyway, celebrating something”.

He stressed that the police were working on uncovering the crime “since this was, in our view, one of the most unprecedented acts of vandalism to have occurred anywhere in Ukraine, particularly given the overtones of inter-ethnic provocation”.

On 10 February all 220 gravestones in the central Muslim cemetery of the Nizhnyohirske settlement in the Crimea were destroyed.  There was widespread outrage and the Mejilis of the Crimean Tatars and the  Federation of Jewish Communities in Ukraine both made statements  expressing concern and suggesting that the scale of the assault suggested careful planning.

Based on a report at: http://human-rights.unian.net/ukr/detail/187374