A group of masked teenagers on a Moscow suburban train allegedly beat a man from Russia's North Caucasus with baseball bats in an apparent racist attack, the RIA Novosti news agency reported on Wednesday.
RIA cited an eyewitness, Ramazan Alpaut, who said that late in the evening on Tuesday, 8-10 young men wearing surgical masks entered the train at a station southwest of Moscow.
“Running through the car apparently without seeing an appropriate victim, they ran into the next one. Soon we began to hear shouts — it turned out that the attackers had started beating a man who was around 30 years old and looked like he was from the North Caucasus. At the next station the teenagers jumped out, throwing a gas canister into the car. Passengers began to cough. The victim lay in a pool of blood,” said Alpaut, who leads a Moscow organization of Kumyks, an ethnic group from the North Caucasus, according to RIA.
Alpaut said that passengers tried to use the emergency button installed in the train car to call for help, but it did not work. He said he ran to the front of the train to ask the driver to get help at the next station.
However, transport police disputed this version of events, saying in a statement cited by news website Gazeta.ru that a man had been injured on the train after clashing with two fare-dodgers fleeing the train attendant.
