Moscow police are baffled by a series of torchings of police buildings claimed by an unknown blogger group that says it is meting out punishment on corrupt investigators.
Five police precincts and a police car were torched between April 26 and May 25 by the group, which does not have a name and posts videos of the attacks on its blog, Blackblocg.blogspot.com.
The assailants used Molotov cocktails, smoke grenades and stones to pelt police buildings and a police car in southern, eastern and southwestern Moscow.
No injuries were reported.
Tatyana Petrova, a spokeswoman for the city police’s eastern precinct, confirmed that attackers smashed the windows of a district police office on Otkrytoye Shosse early April 28 and set fire to a traffic police car parked on Ulitsa Chechulina on May 5.
Petrova called the attacks “the cowardly lunges of silly people.”
She refused to say whether the police had identified any suspects, citing the ongoing investigation, but said she was aware of the blog.
The blog, which provides no contact details or information about its owners, calls on readers to carry out similar attacks.
“Friend, didn’t you ever want to spit in the face of a shameless police officer or a traffic cop, or slug them?” the group said in a post Wednesday. “Together we will defeat police and their inhuman order.”
Repeated calls to the press offices of the southern and southwestern police precincts — whose buildings were also attacked — went unanswered Friday.
Public anger toward police has grown over the past year after officers were implicated in a string of violent and corrupt crimes. President Dmitry Medvedev, who has made the fight against corruption a hallmark of his two-year presidency, ordered a revamp of the country’s police force in December. The reform is to include the dismissal of 20 percent of the police force.
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