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| September 5, 2002 | Thursday | Jamadi-us-Saani26,1423 |
Two held in US for harassing Pakistanis
NEW YORK, Sept 4: The Police in Long Island, a suburb of New York, arrested two teenagers on Monday on charges of harassment of a Pakistani women and her 15 year old son at Tandoor Cottage restaurant in the area.
Suffolk county police said that they are treating the incident as bias crime as Mahmooda Mallik and her son Gibran charged that the attackers hurled abuses and anti-Muslim profanities shouts of “Are you terrorists?” “You blew up the twin towers!” and “Are you connected to Osama bin Laden?”
The police said two youths then began punching Gibran Malik in the face and body. His mother tried to intervene, they said, pulling at one attacker and shouting for her husband, Tariq, 42, who was still in the restaurant, to call the police. The victims said the youths fled as the police sirens approached.
More than an hour after the attack, which was first reported by Newsday, a Long Island paper, Richard Bossi, 19, of Centereach, N.Y., and Matthew Martin, 18, of Selden, were arrested at the parking lot when, the police said, they returned to pick up eyeglasses they had dropped at the scene. The suspects were released on $100 bail for a hearing on
Oct 11.
Each was charged with second-degree aggravated harassment, a misdemeanour punishable by a year in jail. Detective Sgt. Robert Reecks of the police bias crimes bureau said that felony assault charges were not filed because there were no severe injuries, but that under the state hate crimes law the allegations of bias warranted raising the harassment charge to a misdemeanour from a less serious violation.
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