By Michael Holden
LONDON (Reuters) - Police arrested a man on suspicion of murder on Sunday in their hunt for the killers of a black teenager left with an axe in his skull following a racist attack in Liverpool.
Anthony Walker, 18, a local college student, was attacked by a gang of three or four men, just minutes after he had been taunted with racial abuse while waiting for a bus with his girlfriend and a male relative on Friday night.
"Merseyside Police have arrested an 18-year-old man from Huyton on suspicion of the murder of Anthony Walker," a police spokesman said.
"He will be questioned at a police station on Merseyside."
The arrest came after police carried out raids on three addresses in the Huyton area of the city centre.
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Detectives said Walker had been abused by a man wearing a hooded top as he waited with his 17-year-old white girlfriend and a relative at a bus stop in Huyton.
They did not respond and moved away through a park when the gang attacked him.
The girlfriend and the relative, also 17, ran to get help. When they returned they found the victim slumped on the ground with serious injuries. He suffered serious head injuries and later died in hospital.
His sister pleaded for information about the attack.
"We need to find out who did this to my little brother," Dominique Walker told reporters.
"He blessed so many lives in such a unique way. His life was stolen from him. His family, friends, all these people here are devastated."
Police called the murder a "despicable act" and vowed to catch the killers.
"What we are dealing with here is an unprovoked and vicious attack on a young black man which we believe to be racially motivated," Merseyside Police Assistant Chief Constable Bernard Lawson told the BBC.
Knowsley South MP Eddie O’Hara called it a "cowardly, cold-blooded, merciless" murder and said he was ashamed that someone from the local community had committed such as crime.
"Anthony was a son, he happened to be black, any mother would have been proud of Anthony with his educational and career aspirations," he said. "I’m so saddened that his life should be ended so cruelly as this."
He said he hoped that CCTV cameras at the park might have captured the killers on film.
"People don’t walk around Huyton holding axes," he told Sky News. "There seem to be two stages to this attack and there was an axe in the second stage -- that indicates to me that it was premeditated."
