Tajikistan is demanding that Russia conduct a painstaking probe and impose "severe punishment" on the killer of a five-year-old Tajik girl authorities say was raped and stabbed to death in a city near Moscow earlier this week.
The Tajik Foreign Ministry said on July 25 that an official note had been sent to the Russian Foreign Ministry stating that "the murder of five-year-old Tajik citizen Huvaido Tillozoda on July 22 in Serpukhov badly shocked and angered the people of Tajikistan."
The body of Tillozoda, the daughter of labor migrants from Tajikistan, was found in a sports bag near a railway in Serpukhov, south of Moscow, after she went missing on July 22.
"The Tajik side calls on the Russian Federation...to thoroughly investigate this brutal crime against a child and demands severe punishment for the criminal who committed this inhumane act of violence," the Tajik Foreign Ministry statement said.
The regional branch of the Russian Investigative Committee said on July 23 that a suspect had been detained.
Residents said the suspect was a 27-year-old man who lives in the building where the victim and her parents lived, and claimed he was reported to police in 2017 by a neighbor who accused him of trying to sexually abuse her daughter and another girl.
The Moscow Oblast police said on July 24 that they have opened an internal probe into the matter, indicating it would determine whether appropriate measures were taken at the time.
Tillozoda's father, Abdusalom Saidov, brought his daughter's body to Tajikistan for burial on July 25.
He told RFE/RL that he plans to return to Serpukhov in several days to seek to ensure that justice for his daughter is properly served.
