Chechnya's pro-Kremlin leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, said the organizers of Saturday's nationalist riots in down town Moscow were "provocateurs," not football fans.
"I'm confident that some destructive forces stoked the violence and directed the crowd, which rushed to attack migrants from the Caucasus and Asia," Ramzan Kadyrov, himself an ethnic Chechen, told journalists in the Chechen capital Grozny on Monday.
Over 5,000 football fans and nationalists gathered on Manezh Square on Saturday to protest the death of Yegor Sviridov, a Spartak Moscow fan who was shot dead with a rubber bullet in a fight between football fans and migrants from Russia's mainly Muslim North Caucasus on December 6.
Aslan Cherkessov, 26, from the North Caucasus republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, has been formally accused of killing Sviridov and placed in custody until February 6.
Those who "beat, stabbed and shot citizens of non-Slavic appearance were provocateurs, not football fans," Kadyrov said.
He hinted that the riots could have been marshaled by forces hostile to Russia.
"Not everybody likes the fact that Russia is becoming a superpower," the former rebel turned Kremlin strongman said.
He also proposed limiting laws on possession of rubber bullet guns.
"I am against mass sales of arms," Kadyrov, who owns an extensive collection of weapons, said. "It doesn't matter what the gun is called - traumatic or combat - if you can kill a man with it". RIA Novosti
