Indian student killed in St Petersburg

SAINT PETERSBURG: An Indian medical student has died in the latest in a series of attacks on foreigners in Saint Petersburg, law enforcement officials said on Monday, following a rise in ethnic tensions across Russia.   

The attack on Sunday evening came hours after an anti-immigration rally in the city attended by about 300 people. In a separate incident a Sudanese man was beaten and robbed in the city, the ITAR-TASS news agency quoted an unnamed police official as saying.   

The Indian student, 27-year-old Nitesh Kumar Singh, was set upon in a street near the medical academy and was stabbed seven times in the spine, said Indian embassy spokesman, Ramesh Chandra.   

Police spokesman Sergei Sinitsyn said that Singh had not been able to describe what happened.   

"He died in hospital.... The circumstances are being investigated," Sinitsyn said.   

The initial investigation suggested that four people had carried out the attack, said a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office, Yelena Ordynskaya.   

A murder inquiry has been opened, she said.   

Chandra said that the embassy was awaiting further information from a post-mortem due later on Monday.   

"One hopes this is an aberration," said Chandra, noting that Singh was in his sixth year of medical studies. "All of us should be worried when something like this happens."   

There was no immediate independent confirmation of the attack on the Sudanese man, a former student in the city who worked in the building trade.   

Foreign students were to hold a demonstration near the prosecutor's office later to protest Singh's killing.   

While it was not certain that the killing was racially motivated, the city has seen numerous attacks on foreigners in the last year.   

In April a Senegalese student was shot dead outside a nightclub by a killer whose gun was decorated with a swastika Nazi symbol. Also in April a 23-year-old Indian student was stabbed and wounded in the neck as he returned to his hostel. And the trial is currently under way of 14 people accused of stabbing to death a Vietnamese student in October 2004.   

Elsewhere in Russia a mosque and two synagogues have been attacked in recent days, prompting the Kommersant newspaper to write in a headline Monday that "Skinheads have been marking Jewish new year and Ramadan".   

A number of demonstrations have taken place in Moscow and Saint Petersburg in recent weeks against southern Russia migrants, following anti-Chechen violence earlier this month in the northwestern town of Kondopoga.   

Rights campaigners accuse law enforcement agencies of trying to play down the numerous racist attacks.   

Last month the ringleader of a group of Russian white supremacists was sentenced to 16 years in prison over the brutal murder of a Peruvian student in the city of Voronezh -- a sentence that appeared unusually stiff by Russian standards.