Arsonists attack Jewish nursery school in Berlin

BERLIN, Feb 26 (Reuters) Arsonists attacked a Jewish nursery school in Berlin and defaced it with anti-Semitic graffiti, German police said today.

Police appealed for witnesses who may have seen the perpetrators hurling a burning object through the window of the nursery school yesterday.

A police spokesman said the attack did not cause serious damage or endanger children or staff at the nursery school.

Erhart Koerting, Berlin's city interior minister, condemned the attack as a ''cowardly act''.

The number of extreme right-wing crimes in Germany has been rising, climbing by about 20 percent in the first eight months of 2006 compared to a year earlier.

Last year, concerns over neo-Nazi extremism were stoked by attacks such as one on a Jewish memorial in the eastern town of Frankfurt on Oder.

In July, extremists in Saxony-Anhalt burned a copy of the diary of Holocaust victim Anne Frank. Seven men accused in that case went on trial on Monday in the eastern city of Magdeburg. In addition to charges of sedition, prosecutors accuse them of denying Nazi persecution of Jews, a crime in Germany.

Germany's eastern states, plagued by high unemployment, have been a hotbed of Germany's far-right movement.

REUTERS SAM PM1928