MOSCOW, July 25 (RIA Novosti) – A rabbi was attacked and seriously wounded by an unidentified shooter in Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Dagestan on Thursday, Russia’s top investigative body said.

Artur Isakov, 40, was wounded in the chest early Thursday while on the way to his house in the southern city of Derbent, Russia’s Investigative Committee said. He was hospitalized in a “grave condition,” it said in a website statement.

Isakov’s religion is among the possible motives investigators are considering for the attack, the statement said.

Neither the rabbi or his flock have been threatened recently, the Jewish.ru website said quoting unnamed community representatives.

Identifying Isakov by another first name - Ovadia, it said that he oversaw construction of a large community center in Derbent, Russia’s southernmost city that hosts a small Jewish community that arrived from Iran in the early Middle Ages.

The acting head of the republic Ramazan Abdulatipov condemned the attack, blaming it on "extremists and terrorists."

"Dagestan is outraged," he said in a statement. "Extremists and terrorists don't want a normal, prosperous life for all of us."

Isakov is the second cleric attacked this year in Dagestan, according to the Kavkazky Uzel news website. In March, an imam was gunned down in the eastern village of Gubden, it said, and eight more Muslim clerics, including the head of a powerful Sufi brotherhood, were killed in Dagestan in 2012, it said.

An Islamist insurgency, once confined largely to the republic of Chechnya, has spread across the North Caucasus in recent years. Attacks on security forces, police and civilians are reported regularly in the neighboring republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria.