Blacks and Jews were the most likely victims of hate crimes driven by racial or religious intolerance in the United States last year, the FBI said Monday in an annual report.
Out of 6,604 hate crimes committed in the United States in 2009, some 4,000 were racially motivated and nearly 1,600 were driven by hatred for a particular religion, the FBI said.
Blacks made up around three-quarters of victims of the racially motivated hate crimes and Jews made up the same percentage of victims of anti-religious hate crimes, the report said.
Anti-Muslim crimes were a distant second to crimes against Jews, making up just eight percent of the hate crimes driven by religious intolerance.
Hate crimes include not only attacks on a person or property motivated by racism or anti-religious sentiments, but also by prejudices based on a person's or group's sexual orientation, ethnic origins or disability, the report said.
"Just in the past month, three men were indicted in New Mexico for assaulting a disabled Navajo man," the report says.
In another hate crime, a person placed a hangman's noose on the house of a Honduran immigrant in Louisiana, while in another, a man was sentenced for torching a predominantly African-American church in Massachusetts.
Overall, some 8,300 people fell victim to hate crimes in 2009, down from 9,700 the previous year.
Two-thirds of the 6,225 known perpetrators of all US hate crimes last year were white, but they represented only 16 percent of victims, the report said.
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