Initiator of extremist group sentenced to 23 years in prison

12:56, 24 June 2009

BARNAUL, June 23. KAZINFORM -- A high-profile trial of members of an extremist group calling themselves The Wolves of Odin was concluded in the Altai territory. The skinheads committed about a dozen ethnic hate assaults and two brutal murders. Barnaul resident Alexei Kelber, the instigator of the group, was sentenced to 23 years of detention in a colony with a strict regime. Four other members of the group were sentenced to terms of deprivation of freedom ranging from nine years and six months to 19 years, a source in the territorial prosecutor office told Itar-Tass on Tuesday, Kazinform cites Itar-Tass.

The skinheads' first attack was in May 2007 on a Chinese citizen who was on his way to the Hotel Tsentralnaya in Barnaul. The skinheads beat him up with hammers. The victim of the attack survived. The skinheads later committed about a dozen similar crimes.

Mikhail Kundin, a man of the Altai ethnic group, and Azerbaijani Elvin Novruzov were killed in the summer of 2007. The nationalists used during their attacks a radio set tuned in to the police wavelength to avoid being caught.

Kelber called himself Odin after the chief god in Scandinavian mythology and named the "brotherhood" he formed The Wolves of Odin. He was detained in August 2007 and charged with murder, attempted murder, hooliganism, inciting a minor to crime, inflicting deliberately a grave bodily harm out of ethnic hate, and forming an extremist association, Kazinform informs citing Itar-Tass agency.

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