Bulan-Sogotta, Kyrgyzstan, July 15, 2021
Photo: 24.kg A 9-year-old boy was mocked and ridiculed and repeatedly beaten by Muslim children at a summer Judo camp in the Kyrgyz village of Bulan-Sogotta last month.
When the boy met his parents on June 23 after the camp, they noticed that he had a big black eye. When they asked him what happened, he burst into tears and told them about how the other campers beat him every day over the course of the last week of the camp, the family’s lawyer Indira Sautova told 24.kg.
The parents contacted the camp coach who informed that there had indeed been a fight, though the camp chose not to inform any of the parents of the children involved.
Now the boy is suffering from head pains and has vomited several times. He is undergoing treatment. The parents are outraged that, despite their son’s injuries, the coach forced him to continue to train, without medical assistance.
And, as Sautova explained, the boy was beaten for being the only Russian and Orthodox Christian at a camp full of Muslim children.
“The child said that immediately after arriving at the training camp, he had a conflict with the children on religious grounds. He was the only Christian in the group, all the others are Muslims. They started teasing him that he didn’t believe in Allah, that he was Russian. He endured it for a couple of days. On the third day, he couldn’t stand it and threw a rock at them. Then 10 boys beat him up. And every day they would beat him during quiet time,” the lawyer said.
During the 18 days he was there, the boy was subjected to physical, psychological, and religious violence, his parents said. After he returned home, he began reciting surahs from the Koran by heart
The coach and several of the children have been identified, and an investigation is underway. Kyrgyz Prime Minister Ulukbek Maripov has taken personal control of the case, and the head of Rossotrudnichestvo (the Russian Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation), Evgeny Primakov, has called on Kyrgyz authorities to do everything they can to take care of the matter and ensure it never happens again, reports RIA-Novosti.
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