Two Uzbek Jews murdered

(Taskhkent): The secretary of the chief rabbi of Uzbekistan and her mother have been found murdered, Y-net News reports.

The Uzbek Jewish community believes Karina Rivka Loiper and her mother Svetlana, who were found murdered in their apartment, were killed for 'nationalistic motives'.

The 20-year-old secretary of the Chief Rabbi of Central Asia, Karina Rivka Loiper, and her mother Svetlana Loiper were found dead Thursday in their Tashkent apartment. (...)

On Thursday night President of the Union of Jewish Communities of former soviet countries, Lev Leviev, demanded Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov order an intensive investigation to find the murderers. Leviev refused to be satisfied with the estimation that the murders were criminally motivated.

This is not the first time members of Tashkent’s Jewish community, which numbers some 30,000, have been targeted. In July 2004 the Islamic Jihad attacked Jewish sites in the city, including the Israeli embassy. In that attack two Uzbek workers and a police officer were killed. In May 2005 a man wearing an unseasonably long overcoat was shot to death by police after he approached the Israeli embassy yelling “Allahu Akbar.” A dummy bomb was found on his body. In February 2006 Avraham Hacohen Yagodiev, one of the leaders of the Jewish community, was murdered in the Tashkent market.

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