Switzerland’s President stated on Monday that "antisemitism has no place in Switzerland", after the brutal weekend stabbing in Zurich of a haredi man by a 15-year-old, AFP reported.
"The knife attack in Zurich shocked me," President Viola Amherd wrote on X, adding that her thoughts were with the victim and all Jewish citizens in the country.
The 50-year-old man was stabbed late on Saturday night, with police initially saying he had been critically injured, though the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities told Swiss news agency Keystone-ATS on Monday that the man's life was no longer in danger.
A police statement on Sunday said the motives for the attack remained unclear but that investigators were looking into the possibility that it was an "antisemitic crime".
A 15-year-old Swiss boy with a Tunisian background is suspected of carrying out the attack, the youth prosecutor's office said Monday, adding that the teenager was in custody.
The suspect had made a video claiming responsibility for the attack, Zurich cantonal police chief Mario Fehr told a press conference, according to AFP.
In the video, the teenager voices his allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS) jihadist group and calls for fighting Jews around the world, police said.
In the wake of the stabbing, Zurich police said on Sunday they had hiked security around Jewish institutions as a "precautionary measure".
The incident in Zurich came amid a spike in antisemitic hate crimes in many countries since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and the war in Gaza which followed.