Alexander Belenky /  The St. Petersburg Times Students protesting outside the Legislative Assembly on Thursday following the death of Ronald Epasak, murdered outside his home in a northern suburb of the city.

The murder of a Congolese student in a St. Petersburg suburb has been solved, the head of the city police crime squad Vladislav Piotrovsky said Thursday during a meeting with African students.

Piotrovsky declined to give any further details.

Last Saturday night, Ronald Epasak, a 29-year-old third-year Congolese student at the St. Petersburg Forestry Academy, was on the way to the apartment that he rented with his brother at 3 Ulitsa Vavilovykh in northern St. Petersburg, when he was attacked shortly after midnight.

The student died at the city�s Yelizavetinskaya hospital Tuesday night after three days in a coma. Epasak sustained multiple wounds, severe brain damage and fatal blood loss.

Piotrovsky said Epasak�s murder wasn�t race-related, saying the victim was drunk when attacked.

�The student was hanging around with the lowest of the low of this district�s inhabitants,� he added. �They attacked him on the street when he went out to see them.�

Anatoly Krasnoshchoka, a surgeon at the Yelizavetinskaya hospital, where Epasak was treated, said it was clear from the start that the student�s wounds were fatal.

�He was attacked in a brutal, sadistic way, with multiple deep and large wounds, and one of his ears was simply cut off,� Krasnoshchoka said. �Only fanatical bigots could do something like that.�

Yelena Kudryavtseva, who treated Epasak when he was brought to the hospital, said that she did not detect any traces of alcohol when the patient was received.

Epasak�s murder resulted in a wave of protests by the foreign student community. Students of Asian and African origin complained about being constant targets of racist attacks.

The city police and the prosecutor�s office say that the attack was not a hate crime, and that there was no evidence of racist motivations.

Yelena Ordynskaya, senior aide to the city�s prosecutor general, said that investigators don�t have proof that the murderers were driven by racial hatred. �It could have been a spontaneous attacked by hooligans, or there could have been a financial reason,� Ordynskaya said.

The police statements failed to reassure the local African community.

Instead, the mention of Epasak�s alleged ties with local low lifes irritated the protesters. African students compared living in St. Petersburg to living in a ghetto during a spontaneous meeting of protest outside the city�s Legislative Assembly on Thursday.

�We have to carefully choose where to live, where to go and where not to go: continually having to be on alert is intolerable,� said David Masamba, one of the meeting�s organizers. �The police imply it was the student�s fault that he was meeting the wrong people. This is outrageous.�

Igor Rimmer, a deputy in the Legislative Assembly, said the criminal situation in St. Petersburg in general is very alarming.

�I can�t say that crimes against black people are more frequent or more brutal than crimes against ordinary Russians,� Rimmer told the protesters Thursday.

�Criminals kill feeble old pensioners to get their wretched few hundred rubles. This is no less terrible.�

Infuriated by statements by local lawmakers and law enforcement officials, who view the murder in the context of widespread criminality and not specifically as a sign of rampant racism, students from Asia and Africa marched from the city parliament to City Hall.

�My brother told me I can�t rely on local police to protect me from skinheads, and if I want to survive in this country I should find my own means and resources,� said Rahman Rungwe, a 20-year-old Tanzanian.

Rahman�s brother, Hashim, is a third-year student at the St. Petersburg State University.

Hashim said that he has lost count of the number of racist attacks he has suffered.

�I twice contacted the police asking for help but then I realized that I was the last person they wanted to see,� he said.

While human rights advocates in Russia have frequently said that there has been a rise in ethnically motivated crimes, the police are accusing them of misrepresenting the reality of Russian society.

Pavel Rayevsky, head of the St. Petersburg police press office, has said that ethnic minorities tend to exaggerate the scale of race-related crimes to divert attention away from their own wrongdoings.

Andrei Stanchenko, head of the St. Petersburg police task force investigating crimes against foreigners, said this summer at a meeting of the local branch of the Russian Tourism Union that there are 1.5 million illegal migrants in the city, and many of them are heavily involved in crime.

Yury Vdovin, deputy head of the local branch of human rights organization Citizens� Watch, said racism in Russia has been growing at an alarming pace, and that the authorities find it convenient to brand racism as mere hooliganism.

�There are some racists in uniforms as well,� Vdovin said.

Human rights advocates also expressed concern at the recent tendency among nationalist movements to assume a role of the major opposition force in the country, while the democratic forces are losing their sphere of influence.

Yury Belyayev, head of the St. Petersburg nationalist organization Party of Freedom, which was outlawed in April, admitted that his �young patriots� attack black and Asian people regularly.

�We have vowed to continue until Russia gets rid of all this rubbish,� Belyayev said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.