MOSCOW, July 22 (UPI) — Sergei Ustinov, the 62-year-old vice president of the Russian Jewish Congress, was shot and severely wounded in Moscow Thursday in what may have been anti-Semitic attack.
He is in critical but stable condition.
Ustinov, who founded the Jewish History Museum in Russia in 2011, was shot by a lone assailant, the Moskovskij Komosomolets Daily and Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported. The weapon used by the assailant was a sawed-off Osa pistol, often used for firing blanks and flares.
The shooting took place at Ustinov’s real estage agency, which is near the Jewish museum on Petrovsko Razumovskaya Street, JTA also reported.
While the Russian Jewish Congress wrote that it was too early to draw any concrete conclusion about specific motives, it did issue a statement. “The demonstrative nature of the attack and its proximity to [the] Jewish Museum, next to which it was committed, may indicate nationalist underpinnings,” the Congress’ statement said, as reported by The Daily Forward.
The Museum of Jewish History in Russia, a private institution founded by Ustinov with the backing of the Russian Jewish Congress, contains over 4,000 items pertinent to Russia’s Jewish history over the past 200 years.
RJC has now called on Russian Minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Kolokoltsov to “give special attention to the investigation of the attack on one of the leading figures of the Jewish community in Russia [and to] adequately qualify this crime, if it turns out to have been committed on the grounds of ethnic hatred.”
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