ST. PETERSBURG, May 24 (RIA Novosti) - Eight members of an extremist gang in St. Petersburg suspected of being involved in the killing of a student from Senegal have been detained, a prosecutor said Wednesday.
Lamzer Samba, a fifth-year student at St. Petersburg's State Telecommunications University, was shot dead April 7. Police found a gun with a swastika at the scene of the murder, which prompted protests against a slew of suspected race-hate killings and incidents in Russia's second city.
Prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev said six guns, three kilograms of TNT and extremist literature had been found during searches of the suspected extremists' abodes.
The prosecutor said Alexei Voyevodin, one of the gang's two leaders had already been sentenced to three years in prison in a case of a notorious extremist group known as Mad Crowd, and another leader, 21-year-old Dmitry Borovikov, had been shot dead after attacking police officers with a knife when they tried to arrest him.
He also said the gang had been involved in the killing of a Korean national in 2003 and a senior official at the local anthropology and ethnography museum who was shot several times when he answered his apartment door in June 2004.
Nikolai Girenko, 64, was a leading expert in inter-ethnic relations and headed a local commission for the rights of national minorities. He had been a prominent critic of race-hate crime and had conducted studies that led to the convictions of several skinheads.
A radical extremist group, Russian Republic, claimed responsibility for the "execution" on its Web site shortly afterward.
Zaitsev said the gang members had also attacked a post office and cash desks and were suspected of killing two other members of the gang who were considered "weak links."
