Reuters AlertNet - FEATURE-Foreigners live in fear of Russian skinheads

Russia's small Cameroonian community was shocked and saddened, but not surprised, when fellow citizen Kanhem Leon was murdered by racists. They know the danger of violence is ever present.(...) A series of random racist murders, like that of 28-year-old Leon late last year and other foreign students in Moscow and elsewhere, have forced the issue into the headlines. Last month, a man shouting "Heil Hitler" wounded eight people in a knife attack on a Moscow synagogue, and attacks on immigrants are so common that they rarely make the press. President Vladimir Putin has responded by calling racism an "infection" and ordered police to take steps to crush it. But experts say its roots are deep in demoralised post-Soviet society and will not be easy to pull out. The skinheads, they say, are like a mixture of neo-Nazis and soccer hooligans grafted onto the casual racism that the Soviet Union concealed under its communist rhetoric.