New York police have launched a hate crimes investigation after a Muslim woman wearing a hijab was allegedly attacked in a downtown Brooklyn restaurant, it was announced on Friday.
Souad Kirama, a 51-year-old Muslim community activist, said the incident took place at a Panera Bread just a few hundred feet away from the Brooklyn Bridge on Tuesday evening.
While she was having coffee with a colleague when at around 5:15pm she noticed a group of girls sitting nearby and behaving rowdily.
‘All I did was ask them to be quiet and they started attacking me and punching me in my back,’ said in a tearful Facebook Live video which she posted just half-an-hour after the alleged attack on Tuesday.
WARNING: VIDEO CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
Souad Kirama, a 51-year-old Muslim community activist, claims she was attacked by a group of girls while having coffee with a colleague in downtown Brooklyn on Tuesday
‘All I did was ask them to be quiet and they started attacking me and punching me in my back,’ said in a tearful Facebook Live video which she posted just half-an-hour after the alleged attack on Tuesday
She said she was told to go back to her country. The girls then called her a ‘terrorist’ and spat on her.
Kirama said that witnesses nearby did not do anything to help.
‘People were just standing there watching me being beaten up and being called a “f—ing terrorist”,’ she said.
‘They were just having their coffee like nothing was happening.
‘Never in my life have I seen this kind of violence and aggressiveness,’ Kirama said.
The Facebook Live video shows police officers at the location.
‘I made sure to report it as a hate crime,’ Kirama, 51, said. ‘We cannot accept this.’
The Facebook Live video shows police officers at the location – a Panera Bread restaurant on Adams Street in downtown Brooklyn
An employee at the Panera Bread location told the New York Daily News that the attack was ‘pretty quick’.
Kirama told police that the girls also hit her around the head. Police said her injuries were minor and that she did not need to be hospitalized.
The attack was denounced by the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
‘It is intolerable to see so many New Yorkers do nothing in the face of this sort of hatred,’ CAIR-NY Legal Director Albert Fox Cahn.
‘At this moment, when Muslim New Yorkers are enduring a historic surge in hate crimes, we must all stand up when we see our neighbors being attacked.’
CAIR did praise the NYPD for treating the incident as a hate crime.