russia detention
People detained by police line up for identity checks at a vegetable warehouse on the outskirts of Moscow, Russia, on October 14, 2013.
Russian police have detained hundreds of immigrants in the capital Moscow as part of a widespread crackdown on illegal immigration which aims to appease nationalist protests over the stabbing death of an ethnic Russian by a migrant worker.

Authorities announced that 675 people from Central Asia were rounded up in the Friday operation, and the detainees were fingerprinted and their details taken down.

Police further noted that they had registered 159 cases of immigration law violation, including 105 offenses punishable by deportation, as well as 11 cases into forged documents and illegal entrepreneurial activity.

Moscow police chief Anatoly Yakunin said security forces will continue to carry out weekly operations to round up more illegal immigrants.

On October 14, crowds of residents in the southern Moscow suburb of Biryulyovo took to the streets in a second day of protests over the death of the 25-year-old Muscovite, Yegor Shcherbakov, who police say was fatally stabbed in front of his fiancée on October 10.

Police have arrested an Azerbaijani man, identified as Orhan Zeynalov, and charged him with the murder.

Moscow police detained some 380 people on October 13, as a mixed crowd of nationalists and locals attacked a warehouse run by natives of the Caucasus in the Biryulyovo district.

The rioters were outraged over the murder of Shcherbakov. The violence was the worst in Moscow since 2010, when some 7,000 nationalists rallied near the Kremlin, chanted racist slogans and attacked non-Slavic-looking passers-by.

On October 14, police raided a wholesale vegetable market on the outskirts of Biryulyovo, where immigrants mainly from countries in Caucasus and Central Asia work, and rounded up 1,200 immigrants.

Another 450 were detained in northeastern Moscow, also near a vegetable market employing immigrant workers.

Police said they were all arrested to check whether they were involved in any wrongdoing.

Xenophobic sentiments have increased in Russia over the last 10 years in reaction to a huge influx of migrant laborers from the North Caucasus and Central Asia.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has pledged to take a tough stance on migration to the Russian capital.