Racial Flyers Found in Market Items : Hate crimes: For the first time, anti-minority literature surfaces in Santa Clarita Valley. It claims links with the Los Angeles White Aryan Resistance.

Literature derogatory to Latinos and other minorities has cropped up in the last few days at various locations throughout the Santa Clarita Valley, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators said Friday.

Residents earlier last week reported finding flyers stuffed in soft-drink cartons, student backpacks and other items purchased at local markets. The flyers carry a telephone number for a group calling itself the Los Angeles White Aryan Resistance.

While similar literature has appeared sporadically throughout Los Angeles County, local officials said the distribution here was the first they had heard of in the Santa Clarita Valley.

The first incident was reported Dec. 11 when flyers were found in several 12-pack soda cartons at a Lucky supermarket in Canyon Country. Residents on Wednesday and Thursday reported finding hate literature in items purchased from other stores.

The flyers “have been cropping up in a couple of different places,” said Detective Howard Fairchild of the Santa Clarita Sheriff’s Station. “People have been calling to let us know about it.”

Distribution of the flyers followed an incident earlier this month in which a 16-year-old Saugus High School student reported being attacked by a group of white teen-agers who shouted racial slurs.

The student, Mohamed Mustafa, who is Egyptian, told detectives his attackers yelled derogatory epithets about his dark skin, said Sheriff’s Lt. Marv Dixon.

“We’ve had a series of recent incidents,” Dixon said. “It’s perplexing.”

He said hate crimes, other than occasional racist graffiti, are unusual in the Santa Clarita Valley. “We have so few, we react very strongly to those we do get,” Dixon said.

Hate crimes originating in the San Fernando Valley, on the other hand, have grown so dramatically within the last few years that a full-time office was opened Nov. 1 in West Hills by the Anti-Defamation League to handle complaints and investigations, said Mary Krasn, director of the league’s Valley office.

She said more than half of all complaints filed with the regional office in Los Angeles in the last year stemmed from incidents in the San Fernando Valley.

In addition to Los Angeles County, the league’s downtown regional office also covers portions of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties and stretches to Palm Springs and Las Vegas, Krasn said.

Currently, no separate statistics are kept on hate crimes in the Santa Clarita Valley, according to officials of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission.

Krasn said her office now expects to begin monitoring such incidents.

Times staff writer Chip Johnson contributed to this report.