Minsk, Belarus - Vandals defaced six graves in a Belarusian cemetary containing Muslim remains, the Belapan news agency reported on Tuesday.
Visitors to the Islamic cemetary, located in a rural area five kilometres from the village of Slonim in Belarus' western Grodno region, discovered the damage during a morning funeral.
"Someone broke into six crypts, and two of them were destroyed," said Suliman Hadji Bairashevsky, Slomin region iman. "This is obviously a case of religious persecution."
The graves were the final resting place of Tsarist-era soldiers born in Central Asia, and killed during World War I.
Grodno region police opened an investigation into the incident, which they qualified as vandalism.
Local law enforcers four years ago failed to locate a person or persons responsible for breaking into the cemetary to draw Nazi swastikas and the Russian-language phrase "It's time to kill them all!" on crypt walls, Bairashevsky said.
Belarusian police last week placed on hold an investigation into anti-semetic grafitti written on the wall of an Israeli cultural centre in a Minsk suburb, for lack of suspects.
Jewish community leaders at the time criticized Belarusian police for not taking the grafitti seriously, and treating the drawings on the community centre wall as simple vandalism, rather than an ethnic attack.
Vandalism under Belarusian law carries a six month to two year jail sentence, and is a misdemeanour charge.
Ethnic attack under the same codes is punishable by up to ten years in prison, along with state confiscation of all property owned by the guilty.
Belarus' authoritarian government in recent years has cracked down on evangelical Christians, arguing their religion is a cover for foreign spy agencies trying to undermine the country's regime.
A heavy majority of Belarusians follow the Orthodox Christian faith. Established minority religions like Islam and Judeaism are not normally persecuted by the Belarusian state, but attacks against their members are rarely prosecuted.