A 17-year-old boy has been charged with murdering a young woman at a party in a Melbourne CBD apartment.
Laa Chol, 19, was fatally assaulted at a short-term rental apartment on the 56th floor of the EQ Tower early on Saturday morning amid a dispute involving two groups of partygoers.
The 17-year-old youth from Sunshine North was arrested on Monday afternoon.
Laa Chol died in 2018. Source: Instagram
He was questioned by homicide squad detectives before being charged with one count of murder later that night.
He is due to appear in a children's court on Tuesday.
Commander Stuart Bateson earlier told 3AW the young woman's death had nothing to do with Sudanese gang violence, as had been suggested by some politicians.
"When we start to make an issue that is bigger than what it is and when we start to racialise and we start to target this specific community, that leads to some unintended consequences," he said.
"That means a whole community feels vilified. They often feel frightened to go out in public in groups, they're shouted out."
Premier Daniel Andrews told ABC radio Ms Chol's family "deserve fundamentally better than what they've been given over these past 12 or 24 hours".
"I don't think her family would be getting very much comfort from this sort of discussion," he said of debates linking the death to gang violence. The 19-year-old has been remembered by friends on social media as a "beautiful soul" who "didn't deserve any of this".
Police investigate a crime scene at the EQ Arcade building on A'Beckett Street in Melbourne, Saturday, July 21, 2018. Source: AAP
Her cousin Nyawie Dau told News Corp Australia "we need justice for Laa. They need to find whoever did this".
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who earlier this year said Melburnians were afraid to go out to dinner at night because of African gang violence, pinned the death on a "major law and order problem" with the state Labor government.
"We don't have these problems with Sudanese gangs in NSW or Queensland," he told Fairfax Media.
