Student killed and two injured at Russian university

MARIA DANILOVA
IN MOSCOW

A PERUVIAN student was killed and another seriously injured in a suspected racist attack in the central Russian city of Voronezh at the weekend.

A Spanish student was also severely beaten in an attack involving 15 Russian youths.

The three Voronezh State University students were attacked on Sunday at a sports complex in the centre of the city, which is 300 miles south of Moscow, according to the Federal Security Service.

Over the past six years, at least seven foreigners have been killed in apparently racially motivated attacks in Voronezh, where many foreigners come to study.

Rights activists criticised Russian police and prosecutors for ignoring racist motives in attacks by skinheads and other extremists in Voronezh and elsewhere in Russia, accusing them of letting the attackers walk away largely unpunished.

"Radicals don't fear the law. They don't fear being punished," Alexander Brod, the head of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, said. "They take pride in what they call purifying the Russian nation of foreigners."

Dmitry Rogozin, the leader of the nationalist Homeland faction in the Russian parliament, also blamed the frequent attacks on foreign students in Voronezh on police incompetence.
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