A man has been charged with second-degree murder after a 28-year-old man was stabbed to death near the York University campus in Toronto early on Tuesday morning.

Neighbours say the stabbing was fuelled by an argument over religion.

The victim, identified as 28-year-old Alp Efe, was without vital signs on the scene and pronounced dead after arriving at Humber River Hospital.

Alijan Khan, 31, was charged with second degree murder after appearing in court on Tuesday morning.

Toronto police confirmed that the suspect and the victim knew each other.

The stabbing occurred on Boake Street in the Village at York University shortly after midnight. According to neighbours, a group of guys were standing around the porch from about 4 p.m. on Monday afternoon, a normal occurrence.

"I heard them still out there at 11 and I heard one guy say, 'Oh no it's because you're Arabic,' and the other guy was like, 'No it's not, it was your people,'" Megan Griffith, a neighbour who lives nearby, told CTV Toronto.

According to neighbours, the gatherings always started off friendly before they started drinking and having the same religious argument that they'd had three or four times in the past week.

"Some guy's been trying to say that Muslims are bad and the other's guy's been trying to say, 'You guys are bad,'" said Fateh Sandhu, another neighbour.

According to Sandhu, the argument usually escalated as the night went on and ended with someone either storming off or trying to start a fight. One witness said that one of the men from the gathering left the house after the argument Tuesday morning but ended up returning.

Another neighbour, only identified as Tevin, told CTV Toronto then when the man had come back everything seemed fine at first but, "that's when the guy ended up swinging and stabbing the other man."

John Higgins, a man who identified himself as the suspect's roommate, said police arrived at his home looking for the suspect on Tuesday morning and arrested him for second-degree murder.

"They asked me to step back in my room and then they informed (my roommate) that he was being arrested," Higgins told CTV Toronto. "They read him his rights, asked him if he understood it and he said, 'Yeah.'"

With a report by CTV Toronto's Tamara Cherry