By Vincent Boland in Milan

Published: February 14 2010 16:46 | Last updated: February 14 2010 16:46

Four Egyptian nationals were in custody in Milan on Sunday and tension in a heavily immigrant quarter was high after the death of an Egyptian man at the weekend sparked some of the most serious racially motivated violence in the city for years.

Windows were broken and cars overturned in the violence as young, mainly north-African immigrants clashed with police for much of Saturday night following a stabbing incident. Police named the 19-year-old victim as Hamed Mamoud El Fayed Adou and indicated his attackers were South American.

The incident came a month after Italy’s worst ever outbreak of racially motivated rioting, in the southern town of Rosarno. That involved clashes between local people and migrant workers. Although nobody was killed, it added to a swelling and increasingly heated debate in Italy about immigration and racism.

The incident in Milan comes ahead of local elections across Italy next month where immigration is already becoming a hot campaigning issue. Political reaction yesterday suggested a sharp divide between right and left on immigration, the appropriate response to soaring numbers of illegal migrants, and how to respond to the increasing incidents of violence.

The rioting occurred in Via Padova, a boulevard near the central railway station that Riccardo de Corato, Milan’s deputy mayor and a member of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right governing party, described as one of the city’s most multi-ethnic quarters.

He described the area as “like the wild west, divided among gangs of north Africans and South Americansâ€