Deputy chief of the Serpukhov police directorate, community policing department chief as well as two other senior officers of the Serpukhov police directorate have been fired after the murder of a five-year-old Tajik girl.

Citing Tatiana Petrova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Interior Ministry’s Office in Moscow Oblast, Moskovsky Komosomolets says they have been fired for professional negligence.  They reportedly failed to provide control in view of applications about suspect man on children’s playground.  

Besides, the chief of the Serpukhov police directorate will be fired after vacation, Petrova said.  

The body of the five-year-old Huvaido Tillozoda, the daughter of labor migrants from Tajikistan, was found in a sports bag near a railway in Serpukhov on July 23, after she went missing on July 22.

The 28-year-old Alexander Syomin, who lives in the building where the victim and her parents lived, was detained on suspicion of raping and killing the girl. 

According to Moskovsky Komsomolets, fingerprints of Huvaido and traces of her shoes were found in the man’s apartment.  

Residents said that Alexander Syomin was reported to police last year in 2017 by a neighbor who accused him of trying to sexually abuse her daughter and another girl, but police did not institute criminal proceedings, limiting themselves just to conversation with the man.  

The Tajik Foreign Ministry said on July 25 that an official note had been sent to the Russian Foreign Ministry stating that “the murder of five-year-old Tajik citizen Huvaido Tillozoda on July 22 in Serpukhov badly shocked and angered the people of Tajikistan.”

"The Tajik side calls on the Russian Federation...to thoroughly investigate this brutal crime against a child and demands severe punishment for the criminal who committed this inhumane act of violence," the Tajik Foreign Ministry statement said.

Huvaido Tillozoda’s body was brought to Tajikistan for burial on July 25.