15 May 2007
Dmitri Nikulinsky, 22, a Jewish day school teacher and student in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, has been murdered in what some in the Jewish community believe to have been an anti-Semitic attack. In an official statement on Sunday, the Jewish community of St. Petersburg said the details pertinent to the murder "were too scant to make any conclusions," yet community leaders pointed out the rise of xenophobia as a possible reason behind the crime. The president of the Russian Jewish Congress, Moshe Kantor, expressed “our deepest condolences to Dmitry Nikulinsky’s family” and pledged that “we will make every effort to ensure that the guilty party is severely punished as it deserves, irrespective of the motives it was guided by.”
Nikulinsky, was a St. Petersburg native who taught biology at a Chabad-run school and studied the subject part-time. He was found heavily bleeding by his mother outside his apartment on Saturday morning. He had been stabbed in the neck. Prosecutors said on Monday that an unnamed suspect has confessed to the killing. Investigators have determined that a 26-year-old man who was detained on Sunday killed Nikulinsky, the prosecutor's office said in a statement on its website. According to the statement, the suspect told investigators that he had decided to kill Nikulinsky after seeing him with a former girlfriend.
