ST. PETERSBURG, April 7 (RIA Novosti) - A student from Senegal has been shot to death in an apparently racially motivated killing in St. Petersburg, local law-enforcement officials said Friday.
The student, Samba Lanzar, was making his way home from a nightclub with a group of fellow African students when the group was fired upon on a street in the south of the city center, a representative of local student organization African Unity said.
African Unity said Lanzar had been a fifth-year student at St. Petersburg's Communications Institute.
Local prosecutors have opened a criminal case under charges of murder aggravated by ethnic or religious hatred. A weapon was found at the scene, officials said.
The attack is the latest in a string of apparently racially motivated incidents to have hit the city in recent months. A Chinese student was treated after being attacked outside her apartment block Sunday, while a nine-year-old girl of mixed Russian and African origin was hospitalized after being stabbed near her apartment building March 25.
Tuesday, the parents of nine-year Khursheda Sultonova, who died in February 2004 after being attacked by a group of young men, launched an appeal in a St. Petersburg court against a jury decision to clear a defendant of the killing of their daughter. The jury convicted the main defendant in the trial of robbery and hooliganism, and cleared him of murder charges. Six others were found guilty of hooliganism, and another was cleared of all charges.
On March 24, a 34-year-old Ghanaian man was beaten up in the suburb of Kolpino. Two young men have been arrested in connection with the attack, police said.
Other violent attacks on non-white foreigners in St. Petersburg in recent months include an attack on a man from Mali, who was stabbed to death in February, and 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 with non-Slavic features have also been reported in other Russian cities.
The central city of Voronezh alone has seen at least seven apparently racially motivated killings over the past six years, including the murder of a Peruvian student in October last year.
