Who killed Hurshita Sultanova?

The loudest murder case of the past year in Russia takes yet another turn.

The entire country was shocked by brutal killing of a nine-year-old Tajik girl Hurshita Sultanova in St. Petersburg last year.

At first, everyone blamed neo-Nazis. Afterwards, governor of St. Petersburg Valentina Matveenko stated, “We need a show trial!” Finally, department of investigations secretly reported to the governing body of the Ministry of Internal Affairs past Friday that they had captured six members of the bloody crime…

Criminals are policemen's sons?

It appeared strange from the start that police wasn't too anxious to speak of their victory. More so, as it turned out, criminals had all been captured March 1st. Perhaps, some criminals come from rather well-known and respected families of policemen. Uncle of one of them is in fact a General of the Federal Security Services. One of the most fascinating facts that was revealed in the course of the investigation is that the Tajik family, perhaps including its little members, had been dealing heroin! Their competitors hired a gang of young guys to teach those Tajiks a lesson. Apparently, those guys had tried a bit too hard.

Strange family

Many things concerning the crime appeared strange. The girl's father Yunus Sultanov for instance left for Tajikistan almost instantaneously. Before the tragedy, he had been working with some entrepreneur in Afghanistan. What was he doing there, remains unclear. One thing is clear however, is that he had enough money to keep a family and a decent housing in downtown St. Petersburg. It was logical for Russian police to assume that the man could have been easily dealing drugs.

Recently, drug dealers started to involve their own children in their dirty business, since they are minors and cannot be convicted. So a boy or a girl simply hand the merchandise to a buyer and the deal is done. Even in case the child is caught with drugs, police remains absolutely powerless to do anything about it.

Skinhead hysteria

A parallel was drawn between the young girl’s murder and terrorist acts in Moscow metro. The press has gone mad. Suddenly, everyone forgot about the fact that children and teenagers are being killed in Petersburg almost daily. Petersburg's department of investigation has questioned 5000(!) skinheads. Questionings however did not yield any positive results.

Investigators from the department of criminal investigation managed to locate a witness of the crime—a teenage girl. It turned out there was a reason for her being there. Apparently, her friends were those boys who brutally murdered Hurshita Sultanova. This is where investigators encountered one quite fascinating factor. Two of the six teenagers (14-16) came from well-respected families of policemen. One of the boys had an uncle in the law enforcement, former member of FSB. So try to figure out the reason for such hush-hush atmosphere around the murder case.

Another version suggests that Hurshita Sultanova was killed by a Tajik heroin dealer. He simply intended to liquidate one of his competitors by hiring a gang of young criminals. They had to beat up the father and leave. However, the boys went overboard. Someone grabbed a knife…

Sergey Andreev