Spotlight: Another black teenager killed by U.S. police near Ferguson

Another black teenager was killed in the United States on Wednesday, 10 days after the first anniversary of death of Michael Brown, which caused massive protests in the country.

The police officers in St. Louis, which hit the headlines for its suburb Ferguson where Brown was killed, said the young man they fatally shot had pointed a gun at them.

They later identified the victim as Mansur Ball-Bey, aged 18.

However, later searches found no trace of any weapon at the crime-ridden area stormed by the police.

St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson said the gun the "suspect" pointed at them was "stolen", adding that cocaine was discovered at the scene.

"Detectives were looking for guns, looking for violent felons, looking for people that have been committing the crimes in the neighborhood," he said.

The St. Louis area in Missouri had just been flooded by protesters from across the United States marking the first anniversary of the Aug. 9 killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer.

The fresh shooting falls exactly upon the anniversary of not as famous police shooting of another black man in St. Louis, Kajieme Powell.

This has been the second killing of African-Americans by U.S. police in a single month. In the latest of such cases, Christian Taylor, a 19-year-old black college football player, was fatally shot by an officer during a burglary call on Aug. 7 in the northern Texas city of Arlington.

Only a month ago, the tragic death of a black woman in a U.S. prison caught media attention in and out of the country.

Sandra Bland, 28, was stopped by a white Texas trooper for failing to signal a lane change. On a charge of assaulting a public servant, Bland was put into a Texas jail, where she was found hanging with a plastic trash bag around her neck on July 13.

The high frequency of African-American deaths at the hands of policemen has questioned the human rights conditions in the United States.

The country has violated the economic and legal rights of its citizens to an alarming degree, the CATO Institute said in a latest report.

According to the Washington-based think tank's recently published Human Rights Index, the United States' ranking fell from the 17th place in 2008 to the 20th in 2012, declining in indicators of rule of law and economic freedom, among others.

"The U.S. performance is worrisome and shows the United States can no longer claim to be the leading bastion of liberty in the world," said Ian Vasquez, co-author of the report. Endi