Man knifes worshippers at Moscow synagogue

Jan 11, 2006 — MOSCOW (Reuters) - A man wielding a knife wounded as many as 10 people in an attack at a synagogue in central Moscow, Russian news agencies reported on Wednesday.

"An unknown man burst into a synagogue on Bolshaya Bronnaya street and started to attack the people gathered there with a knife," Itar-Tass news agency quoted a city police source as saying. Police spokesmen declined to comment on the reports.

"Most people have minor wounds, but a lot of them," the source told Tass, adding that the man was now under arrest.

Jewish leaders blamed racism for the attack, with Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar saying it was part of a growing a fascist "plague" in the country.

"In places where the ideas of fascism are propagandized, in the end without fail they will turn into reality, as happened today in Moscow," he told Interfax by telephone from Jerusalem.

Lazar said he had decided to cut short a trip to Israel.

Racist attacks in Russia have soared since the collapse of the Soviet Union, mostly conducted by young men attracted by extreme right-wing views.

"It was evening prayers. I heard cries. I left off praying and saw a man I didn't know running away from me," Interfax quoted the synagogue's rabbi as saying, without giving his name.

He asked what the knifeman was doing. The man replied: "I came here to kill," the rabbi told Interfax.

An Israeli government report has ranked Russia third after France and Britain for instances of anti-Semitic violence. More than a million Jews left for Israel in the last years of the Soviet Union, but around a million remain.