A woman dressed in traditional Muslim clothing had her sleeve set on fire outside a designer boutique in Manhattan on Saturday. She was able to pat out the fire and she wasn’t injured, but she immediately saw a man standing next to her with a lighter.
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The police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating to determine if the incident was motivated by bias towards Muslims, the New York Daily News reports. The man walked away on East 54th Street.
NY police are investigating whether a Saturday evening attack on a woman wearing traditional Muslim dress was a hate crime. No arrests have been made.
“I would obviously be concerned because it’s symptomatic of the overall rise in Islamophobic sentiment in our society”, Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told the Daily News.
Last Thursday, a 32-year-old woman in Brooklyn was busted for allegedly attacking two young Muslim mothers.
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‘It’s nearly impossible to keep up with the number of incidents in recent days and months since the mainstreaming of Islamophobia by people like Donald Trump, ‘ he told Daily Mail Online. Police are looking for the suspect, law-enforcement sources said. She tried to rip the women’s hijab from their heads, smacked them in their faces and bodies, and knocked over one stroller with an infant in it and rattled another, court documents said. Xhelili is being held on $50,000 bond, or $20,000 cash bail.
