21-7-2023 (MOSCOW) A 15-year-old Russian schoolgirl, Yaroslavl Shikhova, died ten days after being brutally raped, dumped naked on a railway line and set on fire with a flammable liquid. A train driver stopped after seeing the girl with horrific burns having rolled off the track and onto the grass. Police believe the girl was left to die wearing only socks after being savagely attacked in the Perm region. During her time in the hospital, she identified her alleged attacker, a school ‘friend’ named Sergey Minyazev, 16. His mother is a prison warder, and his father is a police officer. Minyazev has been detained on suspicion of rape and murder, while two other teenage boys are being interrogated about their roles.
The case comes amid evidence of a rise in serious crimes in Russia committed by young people during Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. The girl was put diagonally across the rails, and there was blood on her body. She had burns on her left side, left leg, and arm. Her skin peeled off her hands when they tried to lift her. Her distraught father, a college teacher, said she had come home from a party at Minyazev’s house, but unknown to her parents, she had gone out again by climbing through the window. Her parents believed she was asleep in her room.
The horrific case has been taken under the “personal control” of Russia’s most senior criminal investigator, Alexander Bastrykin. Two months ago, he bemoaned a “general rise in crime,” especially among teenagers and children. “We see a trend when serious and particularly grave offences are being committed by children,” he said. Bastrykin was a university classmate of Putin’s.
The witness who first saw the tortured girl said that she had ‘flammable liquid in her mouth and [in the genital area].’ Her attacker or attackers were trying to get rid of biological traces. He said, “It was very lucky that she was not run over by a train.”
