On the night of July 27, 2005, a Pakistani mother and her two daughters wearing hijab (head scarf) were attacked in Brooklyn in what is believed to be a hate crime.
Sada-e-Pakistan was told during an interview with the family that at about 10:00 p.m., when Zafar Siddiqui and her daughter, Hamna, walked towards their car parked outside their home, on the corner of Avenue O and Coney Island Avenue, two white men and a woman in a white car stopped next to them and started to hurl racial remarks.
When the other daughter, Azka, who sat in the car waiting for her mother and sister, stepped out and asked them not to use foul language, the assailants were provoked further and yelled, “You Muslims, leave this country!” To add insult to injury, one of the white men threw a lit cigarette at Hamna’s face.
Despite the women’s plea to be left alone, the assailants continued to yell at them. When the Pakistani-American family got into their car, the assailants threw a beer bottle at them and drove away. No one was injured in the incident.
Azka, along with her mother and sister, chased their attackers and followed them when they saw that the white car entered a gas station on Avenue K. There Azka got into an altercation again.
Azka told Sada-e-Pakistan that the white men damned her and Muslims in general. She said that when her mother tried to intervene, one of the white males spit on her face and drove away.
At least six or seven people – some of whom appeared to be Muslims – were present at the gas station at the time of the incident, Azka said, no one offered to help them, so she called the police.
The police apologized about the incident, Azka said, and assured them that the attackers would face the law once arrested.
According to Azka, the attackers threatened them with bringing African-Americans to deal with them. She was able to note down the license plate number of the attackers’ car: CVS 1995.
Zafar Siddiqui, Azka’s and Hamna’s father, who has lived in the United States for 22 years, said that what happened to his family deserved a condemnation. He allowed his daughters to report the matter to the police because such incidents could not be curbed until they are reported.
Zafar said that he owns a restaurant in New York while Azka is a student at Hunter College. Hamna, he said, is a high school student. Both of his daughters were born in the United States and are American citizens.
According to reports, the incident was the first hate crime against any Pakistani or a Muslim family in the United States since the London terrorist attacks, which sent a new wave of fear and anxiety among the New York-based Pakistanis after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
