MOSCOW, October 15 (RIA Novosti) – Hatemongering hackers defaced the website of a Russian Muslim organization Tuesday, the first day of the main Muslim holiday, posting a picture of a severed pig head with a Quran in its jaws.
“Somebody posted their own photo,” Damir Gizatullin, deputy head of Russia’s Mufti Council, quipped in reaction to the hacking attack on the council’s website Muslim.ru, which came two days after an anti-migrant pogrom in Moscow.
The offensive photo was accompanied by a message claiming that the photo of a pig – an unclean animal in Islam – defiled the domain’s name, rendering it unfit for Muslim use.
“We’ll soon bury piggies near all your mosques,” added the missive, attributed to “Moscow residents.”
Muslim.ru was down as of this article’s publication, but a council spokeswoman said tech support was working to bring it back online.
Gizatullin said the council had identified the source of the hacking attack and reported it to law enforcement agencies, but gave no details.
The hacking attack commenced late Monday, a spokeswoman for the council said.
Eid al-Adha, celebrated in Russia from Tuesday to Thursday this year, attracted more than 100,000 faithful to Moscow’s four mosques on Tuesday, city police said.
The holiday, known in Russia by its Turkish name of Kurban Bayram, comes at the height of interethnic tensions in the Russian capital, where hundreds formed an angry mob and stormed a suburban warehouse Sunday, saying it was a hotbed of ethnic crime.
The pogrom came after a 25-year-old man walking with a female companion in the suburb of Biryulyovo was stabbed to death last week. Russia’s Investigative Committee identified the suspected murderer as an Azeri migrant. Demonstrators at the warehouse, who clashed with police, blamed the crime on migrants and called for tighter migration laws.
Dozens of rioters were detained, though police let most go without charges. More than 1,200 people were held later in a police raid at the warehouse that apparently targeted illegal migrants in the area.
Russia has at least 3 million illegal migrants, according to government estimates, most of them hailing from predominantly Muslim ex-Soviet states in Central Asia. The Russian capital also sees a large influx of internal migrants from Russia's North Caucasus, most of them also adherents of Islam.
