Four Chinese students were beaten in what investigators said was a racially motivated attack in the Russian city of Kostroma, the Interfax news agency reported Saturday.

Police arrested two vocational school students and an unemployed man on suspicion of attacking the Chinese students from Kostroma State University, who were given medical aid but apparently were not hospitalized, the report said, citing an unidentified law enforcement official.

Police in the city 320 kilometers (200 miles) northeast of Moscow declined to comment and prosecutors could not immediately be reached for comment.

The suspects could be charged with inciting ethnic, racial or religious hatred, the report said.

It said one of the suspects has also been charged in an attack on an ethnic Azerbaijani schoolgirl and accused of shouting nationalist slogans near the city's World War II memorial on April 20, Adolf Hitler's birthday.

Russia has been plagued by a wave of racial attacks in the past few weeks and a marked rise in xenophobia and racism in recent years.

Assailants, often young skinheads or other nationalists, have committed hundreds of attacks on foreigners from Africa, Asia and Latin America, dark-skinned immigrants from former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus Mountains region, and Jews. Dozens have died.