Mourners attend Yelena Sarafanova’s funeral. Photo: 74.ru

Police in the town of Troitsk in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region, in the Urals, detained around 20 ethnic Roma men on Sunday, video footage published on a local VK forum showed.

Anti-Roma feeling has been running high in the region in Russia’s Urals since Thursday, when a local taxi driver, Yelena Sarafanova, was found stabbed to death in the town of Korkino, 100 kilometres north of Troitsk. Sarafanova’s colleagues told local news website 74.ru she had last been seen giving a ride to two young Roma men.

The Chelyabinsk region Interior Ministry called the detention of the men in Troitsk a “preventive measure”, adding that the men had been released after being given a talk about criminality.

Hundreds of people staged a protest in Korkino on Thursday after news of Sarafanova’s murder emerged. Investigators said Thursday that they had arrested a 17-year-old male on suspicion of the murder, adding they believed that Sarafanova had given two men a lift, an argument had begun and the younger of the two passengers had stabbed her.

The suspect has been placed under arrest for two months, the local Investigative Committee confirmed.

An Indo-Aryan ethnic group believed to have originated in Rajasthan in northwestern India, the Roma have been living in Europe since at least the 14th century, with their biggest populations in the continent’s southeast. According to the 2021 Russian census, there were just under 175,000 Roma living in Russia, some 4,000 of whom live in the Chelyabinsk region.

The ethnic group, whose global population numbers between 2 million to 12 million, has traditionally lived a nomadic lifestyle, leading to its members being marginalised and subject to extreme poverty in many cases.