Police 'too busy' to help families as abduction-murders soar

Marina Kuzmina, 20, stared blankly at the cafe table, her hands cupped tight around a mug of tea. 'Sometimes I still can't believe Irina is gone,' she said in a whisper. 'Together we were like one whole person. Now I don't feel complete any more.' Ms Kuzmina's twin sister disappeared after meeting a suspicious man in 2004 in the tough industrial town of Nizhny Tagil in western Siberia, but it was a year before police discovered her body.

Russia's economy may be booming on the back of high oil and gas prices, with living standards rising fast in big cities, but crime and social problems are rampant.

A leaked briefing given by Russia's interior minister Rashid Nurgaliyev in March showed that more than 3.8 million crimes were registered last year, up by 8.5 per cent on 2005. And statistics recently published by his ministry revealed a spurt in the number of people who disappeared without trace.

In 2005, the ministry recorded 958 cases of people disappearing and not being found, but in 2006 that rose to 3,178. The remains of hundreds more missing people were only discovered months or years after they were put on the search list.

Commentators say law enforcement agencies across the country have focused their resources on fighting terrorism, fraud and organised crime, while neglecting searches for the disappeared. 'We have reached a catastrophic situation with people going missing without trace,' said Vladimir Ovchinsky, a retired police major-general and former head of Interpol in Russia.

In Nizhny Tagil, Ms Kuzmina and her relatives were not alone as they searched for her sister. From 2002 to 2006 a series of girls and young women went missing in ones and twos from the city, a sprawl of low-rise apartment blocks and belching smokestacks.