MOSCOW, October 15 (RIA Novosti) – Moscow police detained almost 300 people on Tuesday evening in the south of the Russian capital where anti-migrant protests flared up at the weekend, a Moscow police official said.
“The number of people detained stands at 276 people and 30 percent of them are underage,” said Oleg Sigunov, a deputy head of the Moscow police department for public safety.
A spokesman for the Moscow police said earlier that about 50 “nationalistically minded people” had been detained for an attempt to disrupt public disorder near the Prazhskaya metro station.
According to a RIA Novosti correspondent, hundreds of people gathered at the Prazhskaya metro station at 7 p.m. Moscow time (3 p.m. GMT) and then attempted to proceed in the direction of the Biryulyovo neighborhood where violent anti-migrant protests erupted over the weekend and in which dozens were injured, including six police officers.
As the crowd proceeded from the Prazhskaya metro station, riot police began detaining those behaving most aggressively, while the rest began fleeing the scene, the correspondent said.
An angry mob gathered in Biryulyovo on Sunday over the fatal stabbing of 25-year-old local man Yegor Shcherbakov, blaming the murder on migrants and calling for tighter migration laws. Hundreds of people were detained by police overnight Sunday and on Monday in response to the violence.
Police said Monday that a 30-year-old citizen of Azerbaijan suspected of having committed the fatal stabbing had been arrested in the city of Kolomna, some 120 km southwest of Moscow.
