'We did this to protect the dignity of Uzbeks. 'We made him sit on a bottle so that he repents for his sins and comes to reason,' he told RFE/RL's Uzbek Service. The Uzbek-speaking source, speaking from Russia, confirms that the victim was targeted because he is gay. RFE/RL was able to track down a man who claimed to have taken part in the attack.
Viewers on WhatsApp overwhelmingly praised the violence as a well-deserved punishment. The man, visibly terrified, weeps throughout much of the ordeal. Ultimately, he is forced to sodomize himself by sitting on a bottle, which is then pushed with a bat. He is then handcuffed, beaten, insulted, and threatened with a gun.
He is asked to identify himself and is stripped of his clothes, which are later burned. The series of short clips, making the rounds on the mobile-phone application WhatsApp show the victim, who seems to be an ethnic Uzbek, being bullied into confessing that he is gay. A video depicting a man being raped with a bottle has surfaced on social media, in what appears to be the latest assault on Russia's beleaguered homosexual community.
