A top Russian police official urged the government Thursday to boost security by requiring the mandatory fingerprinting and DNA registration of all migrants who seek work in the country.

The controversial idea came in response to the recent spike in ethnic tensions and anti-migrant rallies that followed the early December killing of a Moscow football supporter by a Muslim man from Russia's North Caucasus.

The head of Russia's Investigative Committee announced Thursday that foreign nationals had committed nearly 49,000 crimes in Russia last year.

He did not say how this compared with overall crime but official statistics show that foreigners were responsible for less than two percent of all violations registered in Russia last year.

The security official however argued that the number of crimes committed by foreigners has been rising steadily as the number of migrants in Russia grows and that safety concerns required urgent action, AFP reported.

"To solve this problem in this field, we must adopt special government programmes that provide for the full accounting of migrants. These measures should "include fingerprinting and genetic records-keeping," Alexander Bastrykin said.

Bastrykin said crimes committed by foreign nationals were one of the main factors behind the recent rise in ethnic tensions. "We have to be honest, and we have said this on many other occasions: one of the factors... behind the rise of the various incitements of ethnic hatred is the crimes committed by migrants," said Bastrykin.