Mixed-race child stabbed outside home.

A nine-year-old mixed-race girl of African and Russian descent has been hospitalised with stab wounds following a viscious attack by a group of teenagers in downtown St. Petersburg, Russia on Saturday. The attack comes two days after the controversial acquittal of the defendants in the trial for the murder of a nine-year-old African girl two years ago.

Despite her injuries, the third-grade schoolgirl, Liana Sisoko managed to give a brief description of her assailants on the way to the Raukhfaus Children’s Hospital where she was treated in intensive care. She said she was ringing the doorbell to her apartment building on Ligovsky Prospekt at around 8 p.m. when she was stabbed twice by 'two older boys of about 16 or 17.'

'It’s unbelievably terrible, they’ve done it in public, at a place very close to a metro station; yet they had enough time to paint a swastika and graffiti that read, ‘Skinheads...we did it,’ before leaving unnoticed,' said Yekaterina Sisoko, Liana's mother as she sat at her daughter’s bedside Sunday evening, a few hours after Liana had undergone surgery on the knife wound.

'Doctors nearly lost hope of saving her life, because she lost a lot of blood from three deep wounds, including on to her throat, but now her condition is stable,' added Yekaterina, who believes the attack on her child had the tacit blessing of the judicial system.

'[The attackers] have been given a license to attack and kill children because they’re sure they will never be punished even if they are caught,' she said, referring to the last week’s acquittal of nine teenagers charged with attacking and murdering the nine-year-old Khursheda Sultanova in February 2004.

'I don’t have enough guts to tell my child she has been attacked because she is black; she won’t understand anyway,' said Yekaterina.

On Monday doctors said Liana’s condition was not life threatening. Describing the surgery as 'minor,' the hospital’s chief doctor Magaretta Zelinkevich said that Sisoko had “been released from the intensive care unit, is now playing with other children, and may be released from hospital in a week.'

The City Court ruling on Thursday caused public outrage with widespread calls for an appeal against the verdict. According to Professor Tamara Smirnova, a leader of the St. Petersburg ethnic minorities umbrella organization, the House of National Cultures, about a quarter of the city’s residents have xenophobic attitudes. However, she questioned the widely-believed notion that St. Petersburg is Russia’s leading city for violent hate crimes.

'Forty-seven percent of Muscovites admit to xenophobic views, but Petersburgers are more open about revealing the reality,' she said.

'Public inaction and a general silence, indicating indifference to the rising extreme nationalism, is tantamount to its justification,' said Aliou Tunkara, head of the St. Petersburg African Union.

'Had a racist attack on a child happened elsewhere in the West, you would have witnessed an immediate public response, people would go out to protest,' he added.

'Russians are tolerant people, but they don’t have a history and culture of protesting in public, no matter how they feel about an evil act,' said Smirnova.

Meanwhile, the Finnish Foreigners’ Union Against Racism and Anti-Semitism will stage a public demonstration in front of the Russian Embassy in Helsinki Tuesday morning in protest against the rising wave of racist attacks on children in St. Petersburg.

'I envy the Finns, they have such an active organization to defend people like us. I couldn’t sleep the whole night on hearing about the attack on the girl. Now I keep an eye out when out with my child,” said Yekaterina Timokhina, mother of a five-year-old mixed-race girl.

In telephone interviews, several Russian mothers of African-Russian children expressed fear for the safety of their children and dissatisfaction at the way the justice system handled the Khursheda case, describing it as a 'judicial litmus test' on racially-motivated crimes.

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