Dima Vishnyakov looks hard out of the steamed-up cafe window on the outskirts of this industrial city on the eastern slopes of Russia’s Ural mountains.
“It’s four years now since she went out and never came back,” he says, without turning his head. The 21-year-old security guard is talking about his sister, Natasha, and the night she stepped out the door of the family apartment to meet some girlfriends for dinner, but did not return.
“All that time we searched for her,” says Dima. “But there wasn’t a single clue as to where she had gone. It was as if she just disappeared.”
Dima was not alone. From 2002 to 2006, a series of girls and young women went missing from the city. Relatives informed police and posted signs in the street pleading for information.
Russia’s economy may be booming on the strength of high oil and gas prices, but crime and social problems are rampant.
Critics say law-enforcement agencies across the country have focused their efforts on fighting terrorism, fraud and organized crime, while relegating searches for missing people to secondary importance.
Only in the last few months has the fate of Natasha and others finally become clear: Up to 30 females were kidnapped, raped and finally strangled after they refused a gang’s demands to work as prostitutes.
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The discovery of the women’s corpses — several years after their disappearance — and the arrest of eight men accused of their murders in February shocked many Russians.
The number of disappearances is skyrocketing, according to official statistics. In 2005, the interior ministry recorded 958 cases of people going missing and not being found, but in 2006 that rose to 3,178.
“We have reached a catastrophic situation with people disappearing without trace,” says Vladimir Ovchinsky, a retired police major-general and former head of Interpol in Russia.
Many of the missing are thought to be victims of pedophiles, human traffickers or extortionists who have forced their victims to sign over property before they are killed.
Analysts say the number of missing people in the last 15 years is expected to hit 50,000 this year, the population of a small town.
But Elena Zelembinskaya, head of the interior ministry’s criminal search directorate in Moscow, says the number of people going missing is not growing: “The statistics have a wavelike character that fluctuates. It just so happens there was a peak in 2006.”
Overall crime, however, also appears to be rising. According to media reports, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said in a speech in March that more than 3.8 million crimes were registered in 2006, up 8.5 percent over 2005.
So far 14 bodies have been identified in Nizhny Tagil. Eight were found in a mass grave about 40 miles away. The rest were dumped individually or in pairs near the city. Prosecutors say unidentified body parts also found could add up to another 15 people.
Police in the city of 400,000 had not linked the disappearances. Relatives who reported loved ones missing up to four years before their bodies were found have complained that search efforts were half-hearted or non-existent.
Police deny incompetence, claiming there was nothing to connect the missing people at the time.
Oleg Ponasenko, the deputy prosecutor in Nizhny Tagil, defended officers at a press conference, saying: “I wouldn’t say our efforts were completely hopeless.”
Some critics blame the Beslan school siege in 2004 for diverting resources from daily police work to anti-terrorism efforts. Muslim, pro-Chechen terrorists took more than 1,200 children and adults hostage, and several hundred civilians died when police stormed the school. The attack prompted President Vladimir Putin to increase spending on the federal security service and the interior ministry to fight extremists.
“The police are operating on the principle ‘no body, no problem,’ ” says Ovchinsky.