St. Petersburg LGBT Organisation Coming Out expresses its condolences to the victims and organisers of the event. We are sorry that people who had no intention to participate in a pride or LGBT event got hurt as a result of misinformation about the event.

We consider the fact that the event was announced as gay-pride without the approval of the organisers to be unethical. At the same time we emphasise that the homophobic attack was a hate crime.

We encourage LGBT community to be cautious: not every event under the rainbow flags is organised by Coming Out. Information about the Coming Out events is always displayed on the official website piter.lgbtnet.ru and the official group VKontakte.

Let us remind that on April 18, 2010 Dream Flash aka as Soapy Piter. This year this event gathered about 1000 people in Moscow and went peacefully. But in St. Petersburg it was attacked by right-wing extremists. Their motive appears to have been homophobia, they were organised and had planned the intimidation action ahead of time.

This event was announced as a gay-pride by an independent initiative of a single person on Vkontakte web site. Organisation Coming Out learnt about a possible attack the day before the event and informed the police. The video shows that it intervened only after a smoke flare was throne and a group of bullies attacked the crowd. Before that policemen didn’t dispel anyone and politely asked people to keep off grass.

At this point we have no accurate information on the number and conditions of the injured. We are looking for the witnesses and the injured of the yesterday events. If you don’t want to disclose your personality we guarantee anonymity of your information. This information is need for a public investigation. Please contact us at vera@lgbtnet.ru.

Translated by Olga Lenkova