A Jewish teacher in the Russian city of St Petersburg was stabbed to death on Saturday in an attack a leading rabbi has said he suspects was ethnically motivated.

Rabbi Berel Lazar said the teacher had been killed at the door of his apartment. He had been stabbed several times on the face and the chest.

"The information currently available leads to serious suspicion that the crime was ethnically motivated," Lazar said in a statement on Sunday. "The victim sustained more than a dozen stab wounds and nothing was stolen."

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Russia has witnessed a rise in racist attacks in recent years. Observers say resurgent Russian national pride and the collapse of communist order have fuelled this increase.

President Vladimir Putin has described the rise in racist attacks as a threat to national security. He has called for the legal system and the police to step up efforts to stamp them out.

Last year a man shouting "Heil Hitler" burst into a synagogue and stabbed nine people, and Jewish graves have been desecrated with swastikas in recent years.

In 2005, five teenagers beat a Jewish man to death with a metal bar.

Under the rule of the Soviet Union, passports belonging to Jews were specially marked, and Jews were often discriminated against when applying for places at top universities and prominent companies.

Lazar said the authorities needed to punish racist attacks and behavior harder in order to cut them out.