A 32-year-old woman, Anna Mochalova, was accused of two hate crimes by the Manhattan federal prosecutor for assaulting two Jewish men with a pointed object, probably a needle. The episodes date back to October 21 and took place a few minutes away in the Diamond District, the Midtown Manhattan area known for the numerous jewelry and diamond shops, many of which are managed by Orthodox Jewish traders. According to the investigators, the woman would choose the victims because she could be recognizable as a Jew.
The first episode took place around 17:50 on West 47th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. A 26-year-old man who wore the traditional clothes of the Orthodox Jews, with a black hat, jacket and tzitzit – the ritual fringes prescribed by the Jewish tradition – realized he was followed by a woman who spoke in Russian. Shortly afterwards, as he walked next to a store, he felt a puncture in the lower back.
Surveillance cameras resumed a woman approaching her shoulders and performing a quick movement with her arm. The man reported a bleeding wound and was transported to the hospital, from which he was discharged on the same day.
A few minutes later, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 45th Street, about two blocks south, the same woman would approach two more men wearing kippah, the traditional Jewish headdress. According to the reconstruction of the federal prosecutor, Mochalova would have repeatedly shocked one of the two, a 37-year-old man, and then hit him on the right forearm with a pointed object. When the man turned to protest, the woman would instruct him in Russian to move away, claiming to have a gun.
Soon afterwards he would have turned to the other man, asking him if he was Jewish. He, though he was, responded to being Muslim. At that point, Mochalova would have apologized and moved away along Sixth Avenue. For investigators, this exchange is one of the elements that indicate the anti-Semitic nature of aggression: the woman would give up hitting the third man after identifying him as belonging to another religion.
It is not yet clear what object was used in the two attacks. The wounds are compatible with those caused by a needle, but investigators have not recovered the weapon and do not know if it contained any substance. Federal prosecutor Jamie McDonald indicated this uncertainty as one of the most worrying aspects of the case.
Mochalova, born in Russia and resident in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, was arrested on 24 October. According to acts filed in court, the police initially stopped it for a violation of public transport regulations. At the time of his arrest, he was wearing a jacket similar to that camera shooting during assault. The investigators also compared the images with those of a previous police intervention, identifying also a ring that seemed to be the same.
On October 25, the woman appeared in front of a state court, where several charges were contested, including aggression and threats aggravated by religious hatred. Initially held in Rikers Island, on 28 October she was transferred to federal custody. Procures two violations of the federal law on hate crimes, each punishable by a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. The defense had raised doubts about his identification during the first state hearing. The charges still have to be shown in court.
A previous episode emerges from the acts that, according to the prosecutors, could help rebuild the motivations of the woman. On 18 June 2025 Mochalova had been arrested after approaching a 19-year-old Jewish boy outside a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school, in Brooklyn. He pulled his phone out of his hands and threw it down, damaging it.
In the recordings of the cameras worn by the agents intervened, Mochalova admitted the gesture, but claiming that she was derided and resumed with the cell phones from the boy and his friends. He also made repeated references to the “Jewish community”. The Prosecutor cited this episode in the request to keep her in custody, claiming that the woman represents a danger to other people identified as Jewish. The procedure for the arrest of 2025 was not clarified.
The case is part of a time when hate crimes in New York are increasing, despite the general decline of the most serious crimes recorded by the city police. According to the latest data from NYPD, in the first nine months of 2026 463 hate crimes were confirmed, against 410 of the same period of 2025, with an increase of 12.9 percent.
Of these, 245 were classified as anti-Jewish, equal to 52,9 percent of the total. It is more than that of any other category taken into account by the police, although the increase compared to the previous year was relatively low: in 2025, in the same period, the confirmed episodes had been 242.
Jews represent about 10 percent of the population, but they continue to be the most frequently targeted group in the hate crimes recorded by NYPD.
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