About 300 people marched Sunday in Russia’s second largest city St. Petersburg to protest the rising tide of xenophobic attacks there and in other major cities, news reports said.

The participants, from liberal and leftist opposition groups and rights organizations, carried portraits of an expert on skinheads, Nikolai Girenko, who was killed in St. Petersburg in June 2004, The Associated Press reported.

Russian state television showed people on the march — which was guarded by police — holding red flags and banners with the slogan: “March against hatred.”

Some also had portraits of Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist who exposed torture, abductions and other abuses against civilians in Chechnya and was shot dead in an apparent contract killing earlier this month, Ekho Moksvy radio reported.

This is the third year the event has taken place in memory of Girenko, who was killed in what many believe was retaliation for his studies of neo-Nazi and racist groups.

Human rights groups say that the authorities are turning a blind eye to the growing wave of xenophobia and racially motivated attacks in Russia that target dark-skinned foreigners and immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus.

This year, 39 people have been killed in apparent hate crimes and a further 308 attacked, according to the Sova rights center which monitors xenophobia. St. Petersburg has seen a wave of racially motivated murders, leading some to dub it “Europe’s racist capital.”

Russian human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, who attended the rally, called on the government to do more to halt the growth of xenophobia.

“The crimes taking place in this city are particularly horrible. We have gathered in order to call on the authorities to put up a wall in the way of those lost minds, who are a disgrace to the city and to the country,” he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Next Saturday, far-right groups plan to repeat last year’s ultranationalist march in which thousands of extremists shouting Nazi and nationalist slogans paraded in the center of Moscow.

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