ST. PETERSBURG, September 25 (RIA Novosti) - St. Petersburg Prosecutor's Office opened a criminal case into the murder of an Indian student in an apparently racially motivated attack, a deputy prosecutor said Monday.
A police official said earlier that on late Sunday evening, four unidentified assailants stabbed Singh Nitesh Kumar, an Indian citizen and a sixth-year student at the St. Petersburg Mechnikov Medical Academy, who later died of his wounds in the hospital.
St. Petersburg Prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev has also met with India's Consul-General in St. Petersburg to discuss the murder.
The attack was not the only recent incident involving foreigners in St. Petersburg. On Sunday, a Sudanese national was also attacked by a group of unknown people, leaving him hospitalized with a head injury and a brain concussion.
Russia's second city has experienced a wave of apparently racially motivated attacks on non-Russians this year.
Zaitsev said earlier that an eight-member extremist gang suspected of being involved in the killing of a student from Senegal and other crimes had been broken up.
Zaitsev also said the gang was involved in the killing of a Korean national in 2003, and of a senior official at the local anthropology and ethnography museum, the Kunstkamera, in June 2004.
St. Petersburg has been beset by negative publicity over alleged neo-Nazi attacks and killings that also included the beating of a Chinese student, and the stabbing of a nine-year-old girl of mixed Russian-African origin in early 2006.
Other violent attacks on non-white foreigners in St. Petersburg in recent months included an attack on a man from Mali, who was stabbed to death in February, the murder of a student from Cameroon last December and of a Congolese student in September.
Routine attacks by skinheads and youth gangs on foreigners and people with non-Slavic features have also been reported in other Russian cities.
A recent string of attacks on foreign students has cast a shadow over Voronezh, which is located about 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of Moscow and has traditionally been a popular destination with foreign undergraduates interested in studying in Russia.
Later in October of the same year, an Albanian national studying at Voronezh University told police he was beaten up near his dormitory and had his mobile phone and ID card stolen. In January, two men from Sudan were allegedly assaulted at one of the city's bus stops, but reportedly sustained no serious injuries.
The attacks prompted Russia's Education and Science Ministry to pledge a review of its list of colleges and universities recommended to foreign students.
