About 1,100 people, including 500 foreigners, gathered in the center of the city to remember all the victims of Nazism from World War II up until last Friday, when Lamzer Samba, a fifth-year student at St. Petersburg's State Telecommunications University, was shot dead.
Samba, a Senegalese student, was making his way home from a nightclub with a group of fellow African students April 7 when the group was fired upon on a street south of the city center. Police found a gun with a swastika at the scene.
Local prosecutors have opened a criminal case under charges of murder aggravated by ethnic or religious hatred. A suspect in the murder has been detained.
The attack is the latest in a string of racially motivated incidents to have hit the city in recent months. A Chinese student was treated after being attacked outside her apartment block Sunday, while a nine-year-old girl of mixed Russian and African origin was hospitalized after being stabbed near her apartment building March 25.
