Man goes on stabbing spree in Chabad House

A man armed with a knife stabbed several people in a downtown Moscow synagogue Wednesday, with some seriously wounded, before the rabbi’s son wrestled the assailant to the ground, police officials and witnesses said.

At least six people were hospitalized in the attack at the Chabad Bronnaya synagogue, a duty officer with the Central Moscow district police precinct told The Associated Press.

A secretary at the synagogue who gave her first name as Tatyana told AP that the attacker wounded seven, some seriously. She said she heard people screaming as the man stabbed them, but the man himself was silent.

The assailant was detained by police and was being questioned, said the officer, who did not give his name.

The Interfax news agency said the man was in his 20s and was a Moscow resident.

The agency also said four people were seriously wounded.

“I saw a man run in. He had a big knife,” said a woman who worked in the kitchen at the synagogue and gave only her first name, Svetlana. “I saw people lying on the floor, cut by a knife.”

She said the man apparently attacked people in the kitchen, then went upstairs and began to attack people in offices before he was stopped.

The man had a knife sheath hanging around his neck, she said.

Avraham Berkowitz, the executive director of Jewish communities in the former Soviet Union, said people inside the building told him that the attacker got past security and began stabbing people, wounding six.

Berkowitz said the son of the synagogue’s rabbi wrestled the assailant to the ground and held him until police arrived.

About an hour after the attack, people milling about outside the building included a man in a yarmulke with blood stains on his shirt.

Berkowitz said the attack was clearly anti-Semitic. News reports said prosecutors were investigating it as a hate crime.

A person described as a witness told Ekho Moskvyi radio that he overheard the man telling police after he was arrested that “he was killing them.”