The FBI has joined a local police probe of hate crimes in the Annapolis area, and its agents already have begun interviewing potential suspects and witnesses in the area, FBI Special Agent John Huntley said yesterday.
Annapolis city police alerted the FBI to the case Monday after vandals spray-painted swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs on the walls and doors of the Kneseth Israel Synagogue over the weekend.
"We'll go wherever the evidence goes," said Mr. Huntley, supervisor of the Annapolis office. "We're already doing interviews in Annapolis and Anne Arundel County."
The incident at the city's only Orthodox synagogue came little more than a day after a hair salon in Edgewater that is owned by a black woman was defaced with racist graffiti. Authorities are trying to determine if the incidents are related.
Some authorities suspect five incidents of hate crimes in the last six weeks are linked to an Oct. 29 rally by the Ku Klux Klan at the State House in Annapolis. Sgt. Terry Katz, head of the state police Criminal Investigative Service, wrote in a memo to Annapolis and Anne Arundel police that the Klan often retaliates after demonstrations with leafleting and vandalism.
Shortly after the rally, bundles of racist fliers bearing the KKK emblem were dropped in predominantly black neighborhoods.
Annapolis Police Chief Joseph S. Johnson said police beefed up patrols around synagogues, monuments to local civil rights heroes and the homes of local government officials after the vandalism.
The Maryland KKK already has been brought into the probe. Imperial Wizard Roger Kelly, who heads the state's largest branch of the KKK, said police had contacted him for questioning yesterday.
"They just asked if I knew the names of anybody doing it," he said. "I told them, 'No, I don't.' And it better not be by Klansmen because that sort of thing gives us a bad image."