Police have arrested a schoolboy for the murder of a young Armenian in what was widely seen as a racist killing, prosecutors said yesterday.

Witnesses to the Saturday murder said Vagan Abramyants, a 17-year-old, was part of a group on its way to an Easter service when young men with black jackets, boots and shaved heads jumped off a metro train and attacked them.

The attackers, described by Russian media as skinheads, fled the scene, leaving Abramyants dead with a knife wound to the chest.

“A young man who was born in 1989 has been detained, and has already confessed,” a spokesman for the prosecutors told Russian news agencies. Interfax said the arrested teenager was studying at a Moscow school.

Racist assaults have become common in Russia, where young men are increasingly prone to neo-fascist beliefs despite the country being proud of its role defeating Nazi Germany.

African and Asian students are frequently targeted, along with darker-skinned immigrants from Russia’s former colonies in the South Caucasus and Central Asia.