The Sensational Story That Wasn’t: Reports Of ‘Stoning’ Death Of Ukrainian Girl Turn Out To Be False
rferl.org
This narrative started as that of a muslim beauty pageant queen being stoned to death by three Muslims for participating in a pageant. All of the usual RW blogs picked up the tabloid headlines, and it then migrated to facebook, where there are likely to be fresh posts about this today. [see the older posts in this search]
However next time you see that honor killing or sharia stoning to death story you might dig into it a bit more before you panic that Western Civilization is ending. If you look at just the facts the police are reporting you find that this girl was strangled, struck once in the head with a rock, raped and robbed in the woods. The police have a single suspect from a family of Crimean Tatars, who are mostly non practicing Muslims. Of course none of the SIOE or SIOA Euro Supremacist blogs foaming at the mouth about this are going to print any retractions.
The circumstances around the death of Kateryna Korin, a 19-year-old Ukrainian student on the Crimean peninsula, appeared to point to a made-for-tabloid tragedy: a young beauty-pageant contestant brutally killed by her admirer, a radical Islamist who chose to stone her to death under an unforgiving interpretation of Islamic law.
There was just one small problem: They weren’t true.
Law-enforcement officials in Crimea have responded to the reports of Korin’s killing by saying the tragedy was an “absolutely routine crime” that involved neither stoning, Shari’a law, nor any religious motive.
“The killing of the girl that took place in the Sovietskoye district of Crimea does not have any underlying reasons like religious, national, or interethnic motives,” Olha Kondrashova, a spokeswoman for the Crimean division of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, told RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service. “A young man has been detained as a suspect, and an investigation is under way.”
Horrendous Crime
The suspect is believed to be Bilyal Gaziev, a 16-year-old native of the same northern Crimean district and a classmate of the victim’s at a local college. He has been charged with premeditated murder, according to law-enforcement officials quoted by Ukrainian media.
So how did a routine — albeit tragic — crime of passion turn into a frightening story about a Shari’a-sanctioned stoning?
Some believe the suspect’s name and his parents’ religious backgrounds have played a role.