Mr Justice Mackay, looking straight at three young Asian men in the dock in front of him, was equally direct in his words: “What led to the death of Isaiah Young-Sam was the colour of his skin.”

Waqar Ahmed, Azhil Khan and Afzal Khan were three members of a much larger Asian gang that chased and murdered Mr Young-Sam, 23, a black man.

The murder, at the height of the Lozells riots in Birmingham last autumn, is one of the first cases to receive national attention that has portrayed racism as something other than a black and white issue.

But the death of Mr Young-Sam is by no means the first case of its kind. Home Office figures on racially motivated homicides, obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, detail 22 killings from 2001 to 2004.

On close study the figures show that the patterns of racism are much more complicated than the stereotype of shaven-headed neo-Nazis abusing and attacking black and Asian people.

In a constantly changing Britain, with new migrant communities arriving from Eastern Europe and Africa, ethnic violence is no longer as easily identifiable as it was in the cases of Stephen Lawrence, in South London, or, more recently, Anthony Walker, in Liverpool.

Communities that were once victimised can also spawn perpetrators of racial violence. In 12 of the 22 homicide cases categorised as racially motivated, the ethnicity of the victims was white. In four killings the victims were Asian and in three others, black. The remaining three victims were categorised as “other”.

Paradoxically, given that slightly more than half the victims were white, half the principal suspects were also white. In seven cases the suspected killers were Asian and in four the ethnicity of the killer was unknown.

There are white-on-white and Asian-on-Asian deaths, two cases involve Asian attackers killing whites and two relate to whites killing blacks.

Each statistical entry represents a story of senseless violence, often fuelled by drink, drugs and ignorance. Mr Young-Sam died during several days of fighting between the black and Asian communities in the Lozells area of Birmingham, which followed rumours of a sexual assault and months of tension between mutually suspicious groups.

Christopher Yates, 30, a white man, was beaten to death in 2004 in an assault by a group of drunken Asian youths as he walked home in Barking, East London. “We killed the white man,” boasted one of his killers, after stamping on his head and breaking every bone in his face. In Peterborough, Ross Parker, 17, was murdered by an Asian gang as he walked his girlfriend home in September 2001. His family later condemned far-right extremists who tried to exploit his death to stir up racial tension.

In the same year, Shiblu Rahman, 34, was fatally stabbed in an attack by a gang of white teenagers in Bow, East London. A 15-year-old boy was found guilty of what the police said was a purely racial murder.

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