Berlin - Both Muslims and Jews in Germany condemned Monday the horrifying knife murder of a scarved Muslim woman in a Dresden courthouse last week.

Aiman Mazyek, secretary of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, said such violence was no wonder when Islam was constantly mentioned in the same breath as extremism and terrorism, but he warned against revenge.

"German Muslims must not be infected by the spark of hate that caused this crime," he said. "Let's prove now that the Germans have no cause to be afraid of us."

The secretary of Germany's Central Council of Jews, Stephan Kramer, said he was appalled by the attack.

"All those people who have in the past belittled our concern about a phobia against Islam in Germany are seeing after this awful act how wrong they were," he told a newspaper, the Tagesspiegel.

He said the German neo-Nazis had been rousing up a climate of xenophobia in Germany for years.

Marwa al-Shirbini, 31, who regularly wore a scarf, was stabbed 18 times by a German man of Russian descent as she was about to give evidence against him in a civil suit between them in Dresden.(dpa)