Murder of 10-year-old Tajik boy at school outside Moscow sparks international outcry, xenophobia fears
The murder of fourth-grader Kobiljon Aliev outside Moscow is now an international incident. On Wednesday, the boy’s home country, Tajikistan, summoned Russia’s ambassador to discuss the killing. Aliev was stabbed to death at his school in the town of Gorki-2 by a 15-year-old ninth-grader identified as Timofey K. The assailant brought a knife to school and also attacked a security guard and other students before being apprehended by police. Aliev was a Tajikistani citizen, and the Tajik government has publicly demanded an “immediate, objective, and impartial investigation” into the boy’s murder, calling it a crime motivated by national hatred.
The boys’ families
Kobiljon’s mother works as a janitor at the school. Since her husband’s death, she’s raised Kobiljon and his twin brother on her own. According to reports on Telegram, Kobiljon’s mother came to the school to collect her sons after hearing about the attack, not yet knowing that Kobiljon had been murdered. She learned her son’s fate at the scene of the crime.
Timofey K.’s father is a self-employed entrepreneur, while his mother works as a nurse. In the early 2000s, both were employed in institutions affiliated with the Presidential Property Management Directorate. More recently, the family lived in an apartment building in the town of Sosny, about six kilometers (less than four miles) from Gorki-2, according to the investigative outlet Agentstvo, which cited leaked personal data. In leaked contact records, one of Timofey’s friends had him listed in their phone as “Nazi.”
The attack
Before Tuesday’s bloodshed began, Timofey K. approached a group of children and a teacher at the school and asked about their nationality. He recorded this exchange on his phone and later shared it on Telegram. When a security guard advanced, Timofey doused him in pepper spray and stabbed the man before chasing one of the students up the stairs and fatally wounding him.
The attacker’s intended target may not have been Kobiljon Aliev but a teacher who had “reprimanded him for poor academic performance,” sources in law enforcement told multiple Telegram channels. Mash identified the teacher as Maria Dmitrievna K., who had been substituting for Timofey K.’s math teacher. She also taught in the school’s lower grades, which is reportedly why Timofey was looking for her among younger students. One of the videos he shared on Telegram shows him checking different classrooms in search of the teacher, saying he’d forgotten her name and describing her only as “kind of dark-featured.” He never found Maria.
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The Nazi boy
Timofey K. was dressed in gear bearing slogans linked to mass killings. On his vest was the phrase “No Lives Matter,” a term associated with a subculture that imitates mass attackers and far-right groups. Other slogans referred to Anders Breivik’s 2011 Norway attacks and past assaults on schools and places of worship in the United States and New Zealand. Before the attack, he sent classmates a “manifesto” condemning Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ+ people, and the left generally, and advocating the need to “correct” the so-called “Great Replacement” — a far-right conspiracy theory claiming that white European populations are deliberately being replaced by non-white peoples, especially from Muslim-majority countries.
The Russian authorities have stopped short of calling the killing a hate crime. Statements by federal investigators have not mentioned a motive. A source told the newspaper RBC that officials would examine whether Timofey K. belonged to any “extremist movements,” while also considering the possibility of “personal animosity.” Pro-war blogger Andrey Medvedev has condemned claims that the school attack is linked to a rise in Russian nationalism and growing anti-migrant sentiment. “It’s pure Russophobia to assume that a Russian would run around stabbing someone over the ‘wrong’ nationality. All decent Russians today are mourning that murdered boy, Kobiljon,” Medvedev wrote. He then added: “But the state still needs tougher migration controls.”
According to Agentstvo, this was Russia’s second known xenophobia-motivated killing committed by a school-age attacker in 2025. The first was in the spring, outside Moscow, in the town of Nekrasovsky, where a 14-year-old killed a nine-year-old boy from Kyrgyzstan. Investigators classified the murder as a hate crime based on national origin. Agentstvo found no other such killings by school-age assailants. A researcher who studies extremism in Russia told the outlet anonymously that the number of hate crimes has risen sharply since 2023 and that the perpetrators themselves have become much younger. Data from the SOVA Center, which monitors hate crimes and extremist movements in Russia, confirms a nationwide rise in “racist violence.”
