Moscow: Moscow police today said they were investigating whether a brutal double murder in the Russian capital was racially motivated amid a surge in racist violence.

A man and a woman "of Asian appearance" were killed overnight in northeast Moscow, police investigator Mikhail Ionkin told AFP.

"An enquiry has been opened and all paths are being studied, including ethnic hatred as a possible motive," Ionkin said.

Independent monitoring body Sova said the two were street cleaners from Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic, who died after being beaten with iron bars and stabbed by three youths with shaved heads.

Sova last year registered an increase in racist violence, with 67 people killed in racist attacks compared with 61 the previous year.

The Moscow Bureau for Human Rights estimated that there were 74 racially motivated killings in Russia last year, an increase of 20 per cent on 2006.

Source : PTI