Rabbi fakes his death as part of police operation to break up anti-Semitic gang.
Authorities in southern Russia faked the murder of a rabbi in order to bust members of an anti-Semitic pro-communist group.
According to a report by The Times over the weekend, police in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia near the Black sea arrested two suspects who conspired to have a rabbi murdered.
The two suspects, 60-year-old Alexander Dudarenko and 70-year-old Zoya Malova, are said to be members of the Citizens of the USSR, a pro-communist fringe group which refused to accept the dismantling of the communist regime in the early 1990s.
Undercover police agents infiltrated the group, which has been described as an anti-Semitic “nostalgia cult”.
One officer working on the case posed as a professional hitman, and was hired by the suspects to murder Rabbi Yury Tkach.
The 52-year-old rabbi agreed to cooperate with police, who faked his death in order to convince the suspect’s the hit had indeed been carried out.
Fake blood was used on the rabbi, with pictures taken of him lying in an apartment building stairwell.
In exchange for the ‘hit’, the undercover police agent demanded that the Citizens of the USSR appoint him chief of the KGB in Krasnodar.