Firsat Yildiz had enjoyed a meal with his friend in the centre of Glasgow and the two men crossed the busy M8 on their way home to Sighthill. On a patch of waste ground beside the motorway a group of men approached Firsat and his companion. An argument followed and Firsat, a 22-year-old Turkish Kurd, was stabbed. He died a few minutes later in a nearby street.
Strathclyde Police is treating his death, in the early hours of Sunday morning a year after he had arrived from Turkey seeking a better life, as an unprovoked, racially-motivated attack and it has once again raised important questions about the British government's programme of dispersing asylum seekers around the country.
Sighthill, a mile to the east of Scotland's second city, is a poor suburb of Glasgow with many social problems, not least heroin, which is tightening its grip on the young. It is not an area that has benefited from inward investment or reaped the economic rewards of a buoyant housing market. Many council flats were left empty and decaying for a long time before the city council welcomed asylum seekers to the area last year.
Humanitarian actions have economic benefits for local councils. Under the National Asylum Support Service (NASS), a government agency established to oversee the dispersal of asylum seekers, Glasgow will receive about £110 million over five years to help accommodate and provide services for up to 8,000 asylum seekers from Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Somalia.
And in a city with a declining population, some observers believe political leaders in Glasgow have realised that asylum seekers, eventually granted refugee status, would increase the number of council tax payers, improving the city's finances.
But Glasgow has made strenuous efforts to welcome the 3,500 asylum seekers sent to live in the city, mainly in Sighthill.
Local people have taken a certain amount of pride in the city's working class tradition of a friendly welcome and compared it to what they see as the negative reception given to asylum seekers in London and the south-east of England.
The local education authority in Glasgow has run induction programmes for children about to enter mainstream schools but community leaders in Sighthill have said this week that what residents need is more information about the numbers and cultural and social traditions of asylum seekers being sent to the area.
The government's target for dispersing asylum seekers - designed to ease the pressure on public services in London and the south-east - was 65,000, but only 26,800 have been sent to other parts of the country.
When the programme was rolled out last year, the Home Office stressed people would be sent to "cluster areas" where ethnic minority communities were already established and could help asylum seekers settle in.
One of the problems for Glasgow was that it was the only local authority in Scotland that signed up to the dispersal programme and so there was nowhere else for asylum seekers to go. While Sighthill had welcomed Kosovan asylum seekers in the past, there were no established Somali or Kurdish communities in the city waiting to help the new asylum seekers arriving last year and many felt isolated.
It also seems that tension between asylum seekers and the local population isn't just about race, but the "politics of envy", as Gerard Seenan of the Guardian observed this week.
When a group of vulnerable people are housed in an area of deprivation, the local community often perceive asylum seekers as the source of economic poverty.
"I know these people haven't got a lot," an elderly woman in Sighthill said the day after Firsat's murder. "But people round here have got nothing and when you've got nothing it's easy to be jealous." Charity groups, such as Positive Action in Housing, believe the government must give asylum seekers a say in where they are dispersed. Robina Qureshi, of Positive Action in Housing, insisted asylum seekers must feel safe.
"The government must have known that bringing empty council houses into use for asylum seekers would result in mass concentration of asylum seekers and fuel racial tensions." The Home Office Minister, Lord Rooker, has insisted asylum policy will not be "run by racists".
So, although it looks as if Glasgow's dispersal programme could be slowed down in the wake of Firsat's death and a knife attack on an Iranian yesterday, the government will stick to its policy.
rdonnelly@irish-times.ie