"During an investigation into the murders of people from Central Asia and the Caucasus, police officers detained six Moscow and Moscow Region residents, aged 17-20, who said they belonged to a local skinhead gang," the source said.
Police also seized ultranationalist literature promoting race-hate from the suspects' apartments.
The source said that the suspects used metal bars, baseball bats and knifes during their assaults, and organized their attacks using various websites.
Russia has seen a wave of racially-motivated crimes since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But authorities have been generally reluctant to treat the attacks as racially motivated, portraying them instead as acts of 'hooliganism'.
However, last month the Moscow City Court sentenced eight men charged with a series of race-hate bombings that claimed 14 lives in the Russian capital in 2006-2007 to prison, for terms ranging from two years to life
