A 60-year-old Bangladeshi woman was stabbed and later died of her injuries in the Jamaica Hills part of Queens in New York City on Wednesday night, just blocks from her home.
The New York Police Department said the woman, identified as Nazma Khanam, 60, was walking home with her husband — who was trailing behind her — when she was stabbed in the torso.
Television channel ABC 7 in New York City reported that surveillance video showed Khanam walking with bags, and a second video showed a man running from the scene. The actual attack was not caught on surveillance camera.
The neighborhood where the stabbing took place.
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Khanam’s husband, whose name has not been released, heard her scream, and ran to her to find her on the ground, reportedly with the knife still lodged in her chest.
No suspects have been found as of Thursday afternoon, nor have any motives been released by the police, the NYPD told BuzzFeed News, but TV station NY1 reported that the NYPD’s hate Crimes Task Force is conducting a preliminary investigation.
Khanam, an immigrant and a retired school teacher from Bangladesh, is also the aunt of an NYPD transit cop, revealed when the NYPD Muslim Officers Society tweeted condolences to the family.
"They didn't take her phone, pocketbook, bag nothing,” Khanam’s other nephew, Mohammad Rahman, told the New York Daily News. “We feel this is a hate crime...We want justice," he added.
"Because of the recent killings of Muslims in Queens, and because of the growing number of anti-Muslim incidents nationwide resulting from the increasing Islamophobia in American society, we urge the NYPD to investigate a possible bias motive for this murder," said Afaf Nasher, the executive director of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
This year, there have been multiple attacks on Bangladeshi-Americans in the New York City area, putting the community on edge, and solidifying their belief that many of the attacks are motivated by hatred of Muslims.
Earlier in August, an imam and his friend were shot and killed in a daytime attack in Queens shortly after midday prayers at the local mosque.
In May, a Bangladeshi man, also in Queens, was punched during an attack where witnesses say the alleged assailant said “Fuck all Indians.” The incident was caught on a public NYPD surveillance camera.
In June, a 59-year old man was viciously beaten while riding his bike after leaving a local mosque, also in Queens, resulting in broken facial bones and cracked ribs.
In January, two masked men beat a Bangladeshi man in the Bronx while allegedly chanting “Isis.”
And incidents against Muslim-Americans at large, or those perceived to be Muslim-Americans, are on the rise.
A report from earlier this year by Georgetown’s Bridge Initiative, a program dedicated to studying Islamophobia, found that in 2015, there were more “incidences of anti-Muslim violence and vandalism” than any other year since September 11th, 2001, according to FBI hate crime statistics.
In addition, there were nearly four times as many attacks against mosques in 2015 compared with 2014, according to a report published by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in June, with many coming in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks and amid a sharp rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric from political figures.
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/2bG59r0
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