A previously unknown group calling itself Jamaat Ansar al-Jihad al-Islamiya said it set fire to a Jewish soup kitchen in Paris on Sunday, according to an Internet statement.

“A group of mujahideen youth who regularly pray at the mosque set fire to the Jewish temple in Paris,” said the statement, dated yesterday, which could not be authenticated.

“This was in response to the defiling of Muslim graves and also to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the fire that ravaged the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem,” added the statement, which was published on a Web site used by Islamists.

Arsonists had set fire to the soup kitchen in central Paris early on Sunday morning and daubed Nazi symbols on the building, in the latest anti-Semitic violence in France, home to western Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish minorities. Noone was killed or injured in the attack on the centre.

Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said the perpetrators could face up to 20 years in prison or even life imprisonment under a new anti-racism measure in France.

It was the second anti-Semitic act in the French capital in about a week after vandals last Saturday drew a swastika and wrote “death to the Jews” on a low wall in front of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral.

A wave of such attacks have hit eastern France, with more than 300 tombs or graves desecrated since April — many in Jewish cemeteries but also some Muslim and a few Christian graves.