Another Attack

Via AP, an account of yet another racially-motivated attack in a Russian city - St Petersburg. A nine-year-old girl was stabbed in the neck by two young men.

Drinking tea in a cafe outside the hospital where Liliana is recovering, Katya recalls how she met Liliana's father Fomkan, a young musician from Mali. They soon married and had a child.

"Of course it's unusual in Russia to have a mixed race child. Even my parents were against it at the start. But I was proud of my marriage and my child," she says.

Four years later the couple divorced and Fomkan returned to Mali. Liliana's life took a turn for the worse. Children began insulting her at school and the stares became ever more insistent.

"It's monstrous to say this but sometimes I'm ashamed to have a mixed race child and I avoid telling people," Katya says.

The three stab wounds on Liliana's neck and ear are healing. But the trauma remains. "She talks only about that, she asks 'why me?'"

Katya, in tears, says she is thinking of sending Liliana to her father in Mali to protect her.

"Liliana has told me 'I don't want to live without you, but I don't want to die here either.'"

The end of the report gives an indication that such attacks are being orchestrated for political reasons:

A Russian neo-Nazi website with a Saint Petersburg contact address this week carried a report of the attack on Liliana calling her a "nine-year-old monster" under a headline reading: "The Clean-Up of the City Continues."