RUSSIA: Russia has seen a second weekend of racist violence unleashed by skinhead gangs against foreigners, leaving five people wounded.
Three Syrians, a Cameroonian and a Turkish man were beaten in separate attacks in the northern city of St Petersburg, wrapping up a bloody month of racist violence.
It comes with police hunting a gang of skinheads who stabbed a 17-year-old Armenian to death in Moscow city centre a week ago.
The skinheads chased him along a platform of one of Moscow's busiest stations, knifed him and slashed his girlfriend across the face, then leapt on to a tube train to make their escape.
On April 20th, an Indian student was stabbed to death and on April 16th a Russian student, carrying anti-fascist posters, was killed, also by skinheads.
Other cities have reported similar racist violence, including a Tajik cook left critically injured after being dragged out of his restaurant by 20 teenagers and beaten up.
Dozens of graves in Jewish and Muslim cemeteries in towns outside Moscow have been smashed in recent days.
Human rights monitoring group Sova says 79 people have been injured by race attacks this year across Russia.
The attacks come as 13 teenagers begin a trial for the murder of a student from Peru in the southern city of Voronezh last October - an attack local sources say was carried out in the mistaken belief that the man was from the Caucuses.
News of the attacks is reported, and glorified, on dozens of neo-Nazi websites which serve an estimated 20,000 skinheads. Several sites feature an online Manual of Street Terror, which advises skinheads on how to corner and beat dark-skinned people.
Aficionados of such sites include 20-year-old Alexander Koptsev, who was jailed for 13 years in April for attacking seven worshippers with a Samurai sword in a Moscow synagogue last January.
He told his trial that he shared the belief of the websites that Russia must be purified.
Despite scores of arrests, the authorities seem unable to quell this tide of violence - there are always more skinheads ready to fill the places of those caught.
Diplomats of African and Asian states have circulated warnings to staff, one official told The Irish Times, after several were threatened.
Last year two Polish diplomats were beaten up close to their embassy. Some diplomats are considering moving their families out of Russia.
The attacks come amid a hardening of nationalistic opinions across Russia. In December, nationalist opposition party Rodina, or Motherland, was banned from Moscow local elections after screening an advertisement that compared dark-skinned people with garbage.
One reason advanced for the rise in racism is the war in Chechnya and terror attacks like the Beslan high school massacre. Another is ever-growing friction with the West over issues ranging from gas prices to the Orange Revolution.
President Vladimir Putin has condemned racism, but some think his government is exploiting the issue to gain votes for the presidential election in two years' time, hoping a traumatized will turn to the Kremlin.
"The spectre of rising nationalism will be used to frighten us into voting for the incumbent," said columnist Yulia Latynina in the Moscow Times.