MOSCOW (AP) - A woman was hospitalized Monday with severe burns from an explosion that went off while she was trying to tear down a roadside sign outside Moscow reading "Death to Jews," police said.
The woman was in critical but stable condition at Moscow's City Hospital No. 1 after the incident on the Kiev highway about 30 kilometers (18 miles) southwest of the capital, said traffic police investigators at the site.
The woman had been driving along the highway when she spotted a sign hand-painted with black letters reading "Death to Jews" posted by the roadside. She stopped her car and tried to pull the sign out of the earth, and was hit by the explosion, according to a duty officer with the Moscow regional police.
A traffic police investigator confirmed that the blast was caused by an explosive device.
Russia's top prosecutor has taken personal control of the investigation into the blast, Interfax news agency reported.
"All manifestations of extremism and national hatred will receive the toughest punishment," Prosecutor Gen. Vladimir Ustinov said, according to Interfax.
The woman was identified by Interfax as Tatiana Sapunova, 28, who was reported to be blinded in one eye by the explosion from a device with the equivalent of between 100 and 200 grams (3.5 to 7 ounces) of dynamite. She had been traveling with her family in a minibus, Interfax said.
The sign was hurled into a ditch at the edge of the adjacent woodland, located along a busy highway near Moscow's Vnukovo airport.
The incident came amid heightened fears of racist violence in Moscow in recent weeks. While ultranationalist violence in Russia remains rare, Russian skinheads threatened a "war against foreigners" earlier this year and several attacks against dark-skinned people have been reported recently.
President Vladimir Putin has won praise from some Jewish groups for supporting efforts to revive Jewish culture after the discrimination and state-enforced atheism of the Soviet era.
Russia's chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, expressed his concern about the Monday explosion that he labeled as terrorism.
"Terrorism in today's Russia, as around the world, is a major threat and both society and the authorities should fight against it," he said, according to Interfax.