WASHINGTON - Some 9,642 people in the United States were victims last year of hate crimes targeting them because of their skin color, religious belief, sexual orientation or ethnic origins, the FBI reported Monday.
Sixty percent of hate crimes targeted individuals or a collective of people, such as businesses or institutions, the statistics showed, while 39 percent were directed at property.
Thirteen percent of the attacks on people involved serious aggressions, including three murders and six rapes.
More than half the victims -- 5,020 -- were attacked because of their race, and two-thirds of race crime victims were black, the statistics showed.
Some 1,750 or around 19 percent of the total of hate crime victims were attacked because of their religion, with two-thirds of those hate crimes targeting Jews and nearly 12 percent perpetrated against Muslims.
Some 1,472 hate crimes were based on a person`s sexual orientation, the majority against male homosexuals, the statistics showed.
Around 1,300 people were attacked because of their ethnicity; nearly 63 percent of those hate crime victims were Hispanics.
The statistics represent only hate crimes reported by the police in the 50 states to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The data showed a rise of seven percent in the number of victims compared with 2005, when 8,804 people were the target of hate crimes, and were almost identical to figures for 2004, when around 9,500 victims of hate crimes were reported to the FBI.
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11/19/2007 15:38 GMT