Moscow children say they have killed at least six

By Vanora Bennett

MOSCOW (Reuter): The Yakovlev brothers -- aged 10, 12, 13 and 14 -- have shaven heads and bright eyes. They live in indescribable squalor in a concrete wasteland suburb and say they have killed at least half a dozen people.

But only the oldest one, Andrei, has been locked up on suspicion of murder and will probably be brought to trial.

Vitya, Dima and Volodya have bragged to police that they beat a drunken tramp to death in a badly-lit underpass. Police said the crime was carried out with unusual cold-bloodedness and savagery.

Whether or not they are responsible, they are too young for Russian law to touch them.

All responsibility for crimes committed by under-14s passes to the parents. And the Yakovlevs' mother, Svetlana, hunched in her dressing gown over a stinking nest of cushions and ashtrays, has been certified as mentally ill.

"This is a very unusual family," said militia inspector Tatyana Potapkina, who deals with under-age criminals in the northern Moscow suburb of Strogino. "There's nothing we can do to persuade their mum those kids have committed any murders.

Crime, including juvenile law-breaking, has soared in post- Communist Russia and President Boris Yeltsin has said fighting it is one of the top priorities of his government.

But so far Yeltsin's promise has produced no tangible results. The Yakovlev boys have boasted to police about five other killings, but the police are skeptical about some of the claims.

Children of the post-Soviet underclass, the Yakovlevs were regularly sent into Moscow city center instead of to school to help eke out their widowed mother's meager pension.

They would hang out near the first Moscow McDonalds, hoping to cheat the gullible -- and rich -- foreigners who have flocked to the newly capitalist country to get rich quick themselves at Russia's expense.

"I used to send them into town to wash foreigners' cars, to earn five dollars by looking after foreigners' cars," Svetlana said, revealing an acute knowledge of the going rates. "I never encouraged them to rob people, only to earn some money.

"All we have to live on is my pension and my child allowance. If they've been robbing and murdering people, how come we live so bad? How come we've got no sheets on the beds? "No, they never murdered anyone."

In front of her, the children capered round the bare flat, showing off for their visitors.

They yelled, cuffed each other and screamed obscenities in a fractured mixture of Russian and English.

They brought out their trophies -- Volodya had a pair of vicious steel-capped boots, imported, clearly expensive, and new.

In return, they shoved dirty hands into pockets, bags and cameras and inquisitively inspected everything they found.

"Give us some chewing gum," Vitya said in Russian, prodding me on one shoulder and grinning. "Give gum," he repeated in English, prodding me on the other and grinning even more. "Give me fifty dollars. Give me five dollars. Give me 10 dollars".

Their dog growled menacingly from under the battered table, covered with packets of cigarettes, full ashtrays and empty but brightly-colored packets of imported junk food.

The boys have just spent a few weeks in a juvenile detention center where they ate imported food such as bananas which they could not afford at home. A parliamentary deputy is helping the mother get a bigger pension.

The walls of their four-room high-rise flat, covered in green- brown mold, show no sign of ever having been painted.

Svetlana and the children still living in the flat -- she has seven, but two are in detention and one has left home -- share one room. They sleep on the floor and rent out the rest.

"It's their father's fault they've run wild," Svetlana said.

The father, a factory worker, died of diphtheria 18 months ago. Shortly before his death, he had taken to the bottle and started beating the children so badly they ran away and lived rough at railway stations for three months.

Asked if they might have traveled to the town of Oryol at that time -- the boys claim to have committed three murders there then, but police say they invented the killings -- Svetlana said she didn't know where they had been.

One of the killings the boys boast about was at the Kursk station, where they murdered a tramp. He had been informing on other tramps sleeping at the station to the railway authorities who wanted to stop homeless people camping there.

They also say they killed a fare-dodger at their local station, Strogino. He had been caught by a ticket inspector they were friendly with, but had refused to pay his fine.

Vitya said he and his brothers had murdered the 60-year-old tramp whose violent death in February landed their brother Andrei in jail.

"Yes," he said with a deep belch, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke out in his mother's direction. She smiled. "You want to know what happened? Ask Volodya."

In the event, it was the mother who told the story.

"Volodya doesn't smoke at home, you see," she confided, pulling her youngest son towards her. "But he does smoke on the street. And he asked a tramp at Pushkinskaya (the metro station near McDonalds) for a light.

"The bloke refused, and kicked him, see? Kicked him hard. He was beating Volodya up. So the boys had to defend themselves. With their feet. With paving stones. It was them that called the ambulance, though, and they sat with him till the doctor came."

"It was only once the doctor got there that it turned out the old geezer was dead," she added mournfully.

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