African's murder 'a race crime'

2005-12-25 18:38

St Petersburg - A 28-year-old student from Cameroon was killed and another African student seriously injured after they were attacked in separate incidents in what police were treating as a race crime, local officials and Russian media reported on Sunday.

"Two African students have been attacked by a group of youths.

"One was killed on the spot, the other was injured and hospitalised," Alexei Grebtsov of the city's police told AFP.

The Cameroonian, identified as Kanhem Leon, was found dead with two stab wounds after the attack, which occurred late on Saturday, a police spokesperson said.

A companion with whom he had been walking in central Saint Petersburg, a Namibian citizen, managed to escape from the attackers.

At approximately the same time, a short distance away, a third African student, a Kenya citizen identified as Mwango Addie Maina, was stabbed and seriously injured, a senior aide to the Saint Petersburg district attorney told the Interfax news agency.

Interfax quoted the aide, Yelena Ordynskaya, as saying that investigators were treating the attacks as "ethnically motivated".

It was unusual for an official to acknowledge publicly and swiftly that race was thought to have been a factor in the attacks.

Often, police ascribe similar attacks to acts of "hooliganism" which entail less serious punishment.

Leon and his companion were attacked by a group believed to be between the ages of 16 and 20, police said.

The Cameroonian was a student at a local university specialising in water supply systems.

Police provided no details on the suspected attackers of Maina.

The attacks were the latest in a string of deadly assaults in the past year by local youths, often skinheads, in St Petersburg and other Russian cities on non-white foreign students.

Those attacks mostly target people from former Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia, but have also victimised Africans and Asians, a trend that has set off alarm bells among human rights groups.

According to the non-governmental organisation, the Moscow bureau for human rights, 44 racist killings took place in Russia in 2004.

- AFP