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SACRAMENTO — Police across the nation detained passengers in airports and stopped them on the streets Friday if they bore a passing resemblance to a Ukrainian immigrant accused in Monday’s brutal slayings of six family members. 

Police said they were taking no chances as they continue a manhunt hampered by language, cultural barriers and distrust. 

Authorities at Los Angeles International and Dulles airport near Washington, D.C., each detained a Nikolay Soltys look-alike for several hours Thursday, until thumbprint checks confirmed they had the wrong man. 

Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies fielded complaints from people stopped because they resembled the 27-year-old Slavic-featured man who now tops the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. A reward for his capture has grown to $70,000. 

San Francisco police poured uniformed and undercover officers into the Richmond District, known for its large Russian and Ukrainian population, after several reported but unconfirmed sightings there. They papered the neighborhood Friday with wanted posters in English and Russian, patterning their search on similar weeklong efforts in Sacramento. 

FBI agents in Oregon concentrated their efforts on large urban Russian and Ukrainian communities. Similar searches were underway in the Seattle, Charlotte, N.C., and Binghamton, N.Y., areas where Soltys once lived or had family ties. 

“Most wanted” posters of Soltys are being posted nationally and internationally, said Richard Baker, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Sacramento office. The U.S. Marshals Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service also were seeking Soltys on a federal warrant charging him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. 

Television’s “America’s Most Wanted” prepared to air the case nationally Saturday night, and federal agents expected to help screen an expected flurry of calls to the show. 

“I’m kind of surprised that there haven’t been more (complaints), and apologize for anybody whose sensitivity has been offended because they’ve been detained,” said Sacramento County sheriff’s Capt. John McGinness. 

But, he said, authorities will keep looking, and “anybody who’s going to have a few cocktails and drive over the weekend is, don’t do it in a green Ford Explorer. They are all being stopped.” 

That was the last vehicle in which Soltys was seen, hours after he is alleged to have slashed the throats of his pregnant wife, aunt, uncle and two young cousins Monday. He was seen with his 3-year-old son, who turned up dead, throat slashed, on a rural trash heap a day later. 

Deputies and FBI agents turned a conference room into a makeshift round-the-clock command center. They were fielding 20 to 50 tips an hour on four dedicated phone lines, included one for those who speak Russian and Ukrainian. More than 100 police combed the streets, including Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking officers borrowed from several agencies. 

But except a likely sighting Tuesday afternoon, Soltys had disappeared, most likely into Sacramento’s community of up to 75,000 Ukrainian and Russian immigrants. 

Partly due to his background, Soltys can’t be tracked by some of he typical methods, said Acting Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Tom Figmik.  

He has no known credit cards. His checking account has little money, and it hasn’t been touched. 

Police suspect he may have owned the green Explorer without registering it, and may have access to other unregistered vehicles. There have been no reports of other stolen vehicles connected to his flight. 

Investigators suspect the unemployed Soltys bullied elderly members of the Ukrainian community, including relatives, into giving him money. They are investigating whether he associated with other criminals or Russian-Ukrainian organized crime rings that generally have been associated with auto thefts in the Sacramento area. 

Even criminals who might normally protect a wrongdoer would seem likely to turn on a child-killer who “has crossed every imaginable line,” McGinness said. 

Since the FBI’s “most wanted” list was established in 1950, 437 of its 466 targets have been captured, 139 of them with citizens’ help. 

But investigators are increasingly frustrated by the slow pace of cooperation from relatives and other members of the community, although local Ukrainians say they are cooperating fully and trying to learn more about Soltys’ background in Ukraine. 

“It goes to the level of trust, their trust of us and their loyalty to him,” McGinness said. “What’s perceived as loyalty may actually be more fear of him than loyalty to him.” 

“I think any time you have a group of people who have fled an oppressed nation, in this case under an umbrella of religious persecution, just by virtue of their background there’s a distrust for the institutions” such as police. 

Soltys and nearly 400,000 other evangelical Christians and Jews entered the United States under a special 1989 refugee program that provided easy refugee status to religious groups claiming persecution by the former Soviet Union. 

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On the Net: www.sacsheriff.com 

www.fbi.gov