Authorities detained several people after the mid-morning attack in the Volgograd region market, about 900km southeast of Moscow, said Major Oleg Ivanchenko of the region’s Interior Ministry. Dark-skinned immigrants from poverty-stricken former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus Mountains region as well as other foreigners in Russia are frequent targets of violence by skinheads and other extremists. Victims have often accused police of ignoring their complaints. Abdul Wase Abdul Karim, 28, died of injuries he suffered when beaten by a group of skinheads near a subway station, according to UN refugee officials. In February, a group of youths in St Petersburg bashed and stabbed a nine-year-old girl from the Central Asian nation of Tajikistan to death and severely injured her father and 11-year-old cousin. Also in February, a 24-year-old student from Guinea-Bissau was stabbed to death in the city of Voronezh in what a prosecutor later said was a racist crime.
