AKIPRESS.COM - A religious protester armed with a knife has run amok during Jerusalem’s gay pride march, stabbing six people – one woman seriously – in the worst incident of homophobic violence in the city in a decade, The Guardian reports.

According to eyewitnesses, the attacker – named by a police spokesman as Yishai Schlissel – had hidden himself in a supermarket and waited for the march to arrive.

They described seeing Schlissel, an ultra-Orthodox Jew who had been released from prison three weeks earlier after serving a sentence for stabbing several people at a gay pride parade in 2005, run screaming through the crowd in a central Jerusalem street, stabbing people at random before being overpowered by police.

An Associated Press photographer pictured Schlissel, heavily bearded and dressed in religious clothes, shortly before he began his attack, walking through the crowd with his hand inside his jacket apparently hiding a knife from view. Another image, taken seconds later, showed him running through the crowd pursued closely by police, holding the weapon aloft.

A paramedic named Hanoch Zelinger, who treated the wounded at the scene, said the woman had been seriously injured, with stab wounds to the back, chest and neck.