Gay Today: World

U.S. Embassy Warns Gay Visitors to Moscow

By Rex Wockner
International News Report

Nikita Ivanov, editor of the Russian gay Web site www.gay.ru
Photo By: Rex Wockner

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow is urging gay Americans to be careful in the city following eight recent murders of men who frequented gay bars.

Officials cited, in particular, the gay bar Kazarma which is inside the straight club Chameleon.

"We believe we may have uncovered a disturbing pattern of murders of foreign gay men in Moscow," the embassy said.

The dead men include British television producer Christopher Rees, American teacher Steve Malcom, Australian petrochemical consultant Thomas Nagy-Bachman, German chef Heinrich-Helmut Kurth, and four Russian men. Rees, Malcom and Nagy-Bachman were killed in their apartments, Kurth on the street.

"To the best of my knowledge all the murders were connected to Kazarma," www.gay.ru editor Nikita Ivanov told the Moscow Times. "It is an inherently dangerous place. The kind of people who congregate there are like hustlers, male prostitutes from the provinces and bad neighborhoods of Moscow.

"My suspicion is that the motive behind these crimes is economic," Ivanov said. "They're committed by some poor boy from the provinces who has ended up in Moscow a criminal and prostituting himself."

Chameleon's financial manager, Tamara Zhikhareva, told the newspaper that the club is safe.

"All clients have to pass through strict face and passport control," she said. "As for the foreigners ... our guards keep an eye on them so that nobody extorts money from them."

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Ivanov challenged that statement, charging that the club's security guards actually point out foreigners to the criminals who prey on them.

Russian police believe the murders are not related to each other, and said there is no serial killer on the loose.

"These were ordinary murders," said Svetlana Baskakova of the General Prosecutor's Office.