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In the latest step by authorities to fight unlawful immigration following an anti-migrant riot earlier this month, the city’s police chief said that Moscow police will raid apartments reportedly occupied by illegal migrants every Friday until the end of the year.

The initiative, announced by top cop Anatoly Yakunin on the order of Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, was promptly condemned by the head of Russia’s top migrant organization, who said it would instigate “immigrant phobia” in society. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny also ridiculed it, saying it would breed corruption — and allow illegal migrants to hide.

As the government rolls out more anti-migrant measures in reaction to the riot in Moscow’s Biryulyovo district, nationalists have stepped up their activities as well, with police preventing more than 120 activists, some armed with baseball bats, from raiding residences of migrants outside Moscow over the weekend.

Yakunin told a City Hall meeting Friday that police will “hold a massive crime-prevention operation code-named ‘Signal’ on Fridays,” RIA Novosti reported.

As part of the operation, city police working jointly with vigilantes, private security guards and other law enforcement organizations will raid apartments where migrants are reported to be living and patrol the streets in search for migrants, Yakunin said.

About 130,000 apartments in Moscow are leased illegally, Sobyanin told the meeting, RIA Novosti reported. All of them will be examined by the year’s end, Yakunin said.

Sobyanin asked Yakunin to “reinforce this work.”

“Until we know who lives in our houses, until the major part of them are registered, there will always be serious problems with public order,” the mayor said.

The new police measures were triggered by a riot of more than a thousand local residents and nationalists last weekend in Biryulyovo to protest the stabbing death of 25-year-old Yegor Shcherbakov on Oct. 10. The rioters blamed the killing on a migrant who worked at a local vegetable warehouse.

Police later detained Azeri national Orkhan Zeinalov for the crime, and initially he admitted his guilt but Thursday rescinded the confession. On Saturday, Azerabaijan sent Russia the second of two notes of protest over Russian authorities’ failure to organize a meeting of Azeri diplomats with Zeinalov, Interfax reported.

Muhammad Amin Madzhumder, head of the Russian Migrants Federation, told The Moscow Times on Sunday that he was “disappointed with the initiative” of police to carry out raids on migrants.

“Recently, our authorities have set a course for immigrant phobia,” Madzhumder said.

“Not only the police hold raids, but they take nationalists on them, which is a very dangerous trend,” he said, in an apparent reference to the numerous vigilante groups that participate in raids on residences where illegal migrants supposedly live and report them to police and migration officials.

In one example of cooperation between the authorities and civilians in finding illegal migrants, top Moscow region migration official Oleg Molodiyevsky on Saturday offered to let residents of the local town of Dolgoprudny take part in anti-migrant raids, Interfax reported.

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{{European Union foreign ministers have arrived in Luxembourg for talks that will have the Syria conflict high on its agenda.}}

Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, said on Monday that the delegates will discuss how the bloc should act on the issue of Syria’s chemical weapons, political developments and humanitarian crisis.

Western and Arab diplomats have been trying to build support for long-delayed peace talks aimed at bringing together President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Syria’s opposition.

Nabil el-Araby, the Arab League chief, said in Cairo on Sunday the talks would convene on November 23.

However, Lakhdar Brahimi, the joint UN-Arab League envoy for Syria, said the peace talks were in doubt unless a “credible opposition” agreed to take part.

“There is an agreement to attempt to hold Geneva 2 in November, but the date has not been officially set,” Brahimi said.

“The final date of the conference will be announced at a later time.”

The opposition’s Western and Arab backers are facing resistance from some among the opposition to attending the Geneva talks as long as Assad remains in power.

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France summoned the U.S. ambassador on Monday to protest allegations in Le Monde newspaper about large-scale spying on French citizens by the U.S. National Security Agency.

The allegations that the agency was collecting tens of thousands of French telephone records risked turning into a diplomatic row just as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Paris for the start of a European tour over Syria.

“I have immediately summoned the U.S. ambassador and he will be received this morning at the Quai d’Orsay (the French Foreign Ministry),” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters on the sidelines of an EU meeting in Luxembourg.

Earlier, France’s interior minister, Manuel Valls, said Le Monde’s revelations that 70.3 million pieces of French telephone data were recorded by the NSA between Dec 10, 2012 and Jan 8, 2013 were “shocking.”

“If an allied country spies on France or spies on other European countries, that’s totally unacceptable,” Valls told Europe 1 radio.

U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Rivkin declined immediate comment on reports that he had been called in by the French foreign ministry but stressed that U.S.-French ties were close.

“This relationship on a military, intelligence, special forces … level is the best it’s been in a generation,” Rivkin told Reuters as Kerry arrived in Paris.

In July, Paris prosecutors opened a preliminary inquiries into the NSA’s program, known as Prism, after Germany’s Der Spiegel and Britain’s The Guardian revealed wide-scale spying by the agency leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“We were warned in June (about the program) and we reacted strongly but obviously we need to go further,” Fabius said. “We must quickly assure that these practices aren’t repeated.”

The NSA’s targets appeared to be individuals suspected of links to terrorism, as well as those tied to French business or politics, Le Monde wrote.

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