MOSCOW — Several dozen people in a Roma community in southern Ukraine were forced to flee after a mob tore through their neighborhood over the weekend, breaking windows, tearing down fences, and even setting a house on fire while the heavily outnumbered police watched.

The violence in the small town, Loshchynivka, was touched off after a local man was arrested Saturday in connection with the rape and killing of a 9-year-old girl. A Ukrainian rights organization, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, noted that the man was not Roma.

But residents said tensions between non-Roma and Roma, already high, boiled over after the girl’s body was found. One villager, Oksana Glinko, told the local media that people in Loshchynivka were “living in constant fear’’ of the Roma.

After the girl’s death, hundreds of residents demanded that the Roma be expelled, and Sunday they gained the backing of the district council.

New York Times