Young people later identified as local school students aged 15-16 threw rocks against the mosque in the city of Dzerzhinsk Friday, the day before Muslims celebrate the birth of the Prophet Mohammed. On Saturday, a petrol bomb was thrown into the mosque.
Local police said it was the latest in a string of similar attacks on places of worship reported in the region this year, including on an Orthodox church and a synagogue in Nizhny Novgorod, the regional center.
Umar-khazrit Idrisov, Muslim leader in Nizhny Novgorod Region, said judicial unwillingness to treat such incidents as attempts to fuel ethnic and religious hatred contributed to further attacks. Police and the judiciary treat such incidents as acts of hooliganism.
"Hooliganism is when lamps are removed from entrance halls or garbage is thrown onto the streets, but not when children are killed because of racial hatred or our temples are desecrated," Idrisov said in an apparent reference to the murder of a nine-year-old Tajik girl in St. Petersburg in February 2004.
The jury convicted the main defendant in the trial of robbery and hooliganism, and cleared him of murder charges. Six others were found guilty of hooliganism, and another was cleared of all charges.
Racially- and religiously-motivated attacks have been reported in many Russian cities, St. Petersburg and Voronezh, in central Russia, being the most notorious in this respect.
Moscow too witnessed a shocking attack on a synagogue January 11, 2006, when a 20-year-old man stabbed nine worshippers with a hunting knife.
On April 1, some 15 men attacked a culture official and famous singer from Russia's North Caucasus republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, who suffered a broken cheekbone and other injuries. Witnesses said the attackers were shouting "Russia is for Russians!"
The incidents have prompted Russian and foreign human-rights groups to raise concerns over the alarming spread of racist and xenophobic attitudes in the country.
