MOSCOW, October 12 (RIA Novosti) – Police in Moscow detained a total of 87 migrants on Saturday while searching for a suspected killer of a young man, a police spokesman has said.
Earlier on Saturday, police launched an operation to arrest the suspect who had allegedly murdered a young man in front of his girlfriend’s eyes in southwest Moscow.
Investigators conducted searches at the locations with large concentrations of immigrant workers, including cafes, restaurants and saunas. As a result of the operation, “87 foreign citizens who were illegally staying in Russia” were detained, a spokesman said.
A foreign national who had been put on an international wanted list was also captured by the investigators, he added.
Last week, over 100 illegal migrants from Central Asia and Ukraine were detained in Moscow, Russia’s Federal Migration Service reported.
Police have conducted a series of sweeps and mass checks of markets and other locations in recent months, after a policeman was injured by a mob at a Moscow market while trying to detain a man suspected of rape at the end of July.
Economic growth driven by revenues from oil exports and a dwindling domestic labor force have attracted millions of labor migrants, many of them the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Some 11.3 million foreigners entered Russia this year, of whom 3 million work illegally, the Federal Migration Service said in late July.
