Migrants responsible for 1 in 5 murders, 1 in 6 rapes in St. Petersburg in 2013 - police
ST. PETERSBURG. Jan 29 (Interfax) - The rate of murders, malicious injuries and rapes perpetrated by migrants grew in St. Petersburg in 2013.
The migrant crime rate increased by 34% last year, acting head of the St. Petersburg department of the Russian Investigative Committee Alexander Klaus said at a meeting of the department board on Wednesday.
Migrants were responsible for one in five murders, one in six rapes and approximately 60% of all crimes committed in public places, Klaus said.
"Migrants tend to form gangs and terrorize the local population," he said, adding that criminal cases had been opened against 18 ethnic gangs in the past three years.
A cause of migrant crime is the availability of places of high concentration of migrants in the city, Klaus said. "Such places present a real threat: they may transform a number of city areas into ghettoes where the law will have no effect and the real power will be in the hands of local crime lords," the acting department head concluded.