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380 Detained in Moscow Riot, Situation 'Stabilized'

Police have detained about 380 people while more than 20 were injured amid anti-migrant riots that broke out on Sunday in Moscow's southern district of Biryulyovo.

Public order was "restored" in the district by around 1.30 a.m. Monday, Interfax reported, but in a sign that authorities fear more riots, reserve police forces are on patrol in the district.

Furthermore, the head of Russia's main advocate group for migrants has called on foreigners to stay away from Moscow's streets and public facilities.

Several thousand people rioted in Biryulyovo on Sunday, storming a shopping center where migrants worked, tipping over cars, constructing barricades and throwing stones at the police in protest of last week's murder of a 25-year-old local resident Yegor Shcherbakov, who was stabbed to death while walking home with his girlfriend. The attacker was identified as a migrant by Russian media.

Twenty-three people were injured in the riots, eight of whom were hospitalized, including five people from former Soviet republics, an unidentified health service official said. The city's police department later said that 5 riot police had been hospitalized.

Police late Sunday were interrogating some 380 people who were detained during the protest, a police spokesman said.

Muhammad Amin Madzhumder, head of the Russian Migrants Federation, has warned members of national diasporas against "walking around and visiting public places" for fear of "possible attacks" on them "in different districts of Moscow.

"Nationalists are behaving very aggressively," Madzhumder told Interfax Sunday. In Zapadnoye Biryulyovo, in particular, there are "hundreds of drunk aggressive youngsters and a lot of nationalists," Madzhumder said.

Madzhumder and fellow members of his organization visited Biryulyovo to tell local residents that "criminals have no nationality" and that he and his colleagues also wanted the murderer to get a "deserved punishment" but police advised them against meeting the residents over concerns for their safety, Madzhumder told Izvestia Sunday.

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