A Yekaterinburg court arrested a 23-year-old local man named Danil Fomin Monday on suspicion of murdering Francois Ndjaseli, a graduate student from Gabon who was studying at Ural Federal University, according to the Telegram channel It’s My City.
Prosecutors requested that Fomin be held in a pre-trial detention center to prevent him from fleeing investigators. According to a representative of the prosecutor’s office, the defendant is unemployed, not a student, and attempted to flee the scene immediately after the murder took place.
Local media first reported on 32-year-old Francois Ndjaseli’s murder on the morning of August 18. He was stabbed with a knife during a fight at a Burger King in downtown Yekaterinburg. The victim’s friends told journalists that two men approached Ndjaseli and said, “Oh, look, a Black guy — let’s slash him,” before stabbing him in the armpit, hitting an artery.
Ural Federal University has expressed its condolences to Ndjaseli’s family and loved ones. In a statement, the university said that Ndjaseli had “great respect for Russia’s culture” and had come to Yekaterinburg “to gain the knowledge necessary for him to work for the good of his country, Gabon, and to develop its economy.” Ndjaseli had completed two years of a graduate program in the school’s economics and environmental management department. In 2019, he was one of seven students to be named Foreign Student of the Year.
Ndjaseli’s friends told the local news site E1.ru that he was a “kind and compassionate” person who avoided conflicts. One of them said the murder was fueled by racism and that even since Ndjaseli’s death, foreign students at the university have been afraid to go outside.
Friends of Fomin, the alleged murderer, on the other hand, have maintained that the “conflict was not related to ideas of racial superiority” and that Fomin and Ndjaseli were fighting over a woman. “Danil said that he didn’t mean to kill his rival and that [Ndjaseli] hit him first. And that this was self-defense and that the African wasn’t alone,” one friend said.
Fomin’s parents, for their part, have said the fight broke out after Ndjaseli approached the girlfriend of one of Fomin’s friends and she told her boyfriend about it. The parents insist that it was Ndjaseli and one of his friends who started the fight and that Fomin was “standing up for” his friend. According to them, Fomin lost consciousness after Ndjaseli hit him, and when he came to, Ndjaseli was sitting on him and beating him. After that, they say, Fomin began losing consciousness again, so he took out a knife and stabbed Ndjaseli to protect himself.
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“Why did this Black man come up to her, stroke her arm, and blow her a kiss? […] Everyone has to bow to them. Nobody makes such a commotion when they slaughter their own. […] This was all started by a totally different person, and my son was standing up for him. He can’t stand idly by and watch a weak person get abused,” Fomin’s father said in court.
The Telegram channel Antifa.ru reported that a private neo-Nazi Telegram channel announced a fundraiser to cover Fomin’s legal fees. Fomin’s parents denied having heard about this fundraiser and said they paid for their son’s lawyer themselves. According to them, Fomin has never been involved with any radical organizations.
A secretary of the Gabonese Embassy in Moscow has reportedly traveled to Yekaterinburg to learn about the circumstances of Ndjaseli’s death and to inform Ndjaseli’s family about the investigation. The Russian police, the Russian Investigative Committee, and the prosecutor’s office have not commented on the case.
Yekaterinburg residents have set up a memorial outside the restaurant where Ndjaseli was killed, leaving flowers and photographs of him at the site. On Sunday night, people wearing camouflage destroyed the memorial, according to local media, but residents restored it shortly after.
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