MOSCOW, March 1. /TASS/. The Kremlin has described the alleged murder of a four-year-old girl in Moscow by her nanny of Central Asian origin as a monstrous tragedy but warned against linking it somehow with the nationalities question.
"What sort of nationalities question is this?" presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov replied to a mass media question about Monday’s tragedy in Moscow. He recalled that Moscow was a large multi-religious and multi-ethnic megalopolis.
"Don’t you link this with some nationalities question. It was a terrible tragedy, either in terms of its inhumanness or in terms of insanity. The investigation will possibly find out," Peskov said.
He is against wide discussions of such themes in the mass media.
"In this respect I fully agree with the [federal] channels," Peskov said, when asked why the crime was absent from the news bulletins of all major broadcasters.
"The Kremlin issues no instructions to the federal channels," Peskov said in reply to speculations a corresponding directive might have been dispatched. "It is true that the channels, as we know, made a decision not to show this terrible tragedy. I believe that one can only support this decision, because the incident was too terrible to be shown on TV," Peskov said once again. He recalled that it was a world mass media trend to avoid showing footage of too brutal high-profile crimes.
"In this way the mass media demonstrate their civic attitude," Peskov said.
He added that the Kremlin had established no special supervision over the investigation of that case. As for whether special services might be involved in the investigation, he advised everybody to address the question to the agencies concerned.
When firefighters were called to deal with a blaze inside an apartment of a multi-storey building in Moscow’s Narodnogo Opolcheniya Street, they found the beheaded body of a four-year-old girl. The girl’s nanny, Uzbekistan-born Gulchekhra Bobokulova, was detained as a potential suspect. According to a source in the law enforcement the woman is being checked for the presence of psychotropic drugs or narcotics in her blood. She will undergo comprehensive psychological and psychiatric examination in a special clinic.