Just before the Greyhound Bus (#2545) left the Syracuse station for New York at 2pm, an immigration officer came up to passenger Gurdayal Singh, 36, a resident of Woodside, Queens and chairman of the local Sikh temple, and asked for identification. The officer was satisfied when Singh, a U.S. citizen, showed him his papers.

That was not enough for a white man in his forties, who was sitting behind

Singh, and started harassing him as the bus moved onto the highway.

"Hey, you son of Bin Laden." Singh recalls the taunt and how the "tattooed and rough-looking" man accosted him. "You're Bin Laden, aren't you?”

"The bus was crowded and a number of passengers sitting near us in the back started laughing," Singh remembered painfully.

The man said other "unpleasant things" Singh does not wish to remember.

Singh, a devout Sikh, wears a turban and refrains from shaving his beard. "I told him that I was a Sikh and not even a Muslim."

The copassengers, with the egging of the racist man, also humiliated him. "Not everyone on the bus, but quite a few of them," Singh said.

"So I decided to have a talk with the bus driver," Singh recalled. "He knew what was going on in the back of the bus, but he refused to help me. 'I can't do anything, the driver said.'"

At a rest stop near Scott, Pennsylvania, Singh got off the bus to use the rest room. The man followed him in and started calling him names. Singh was now really nervous.

"He closed the door behind him," Singh said. "Now he wouldn't let me leave the rest room. I tried to get by and then he punched me on the shoulder."

Another bus passenger, who wanted to use the rest room, pushed the door in and saw the incident and intervened.

"If this kind man had not helped me, the racist guy would have hurt me," Singh said.

The name calling didn't stop when the bus took off again. And Singh was not getting much help from the Greyhound driver.

"At one point, the driver stopped the bus in the middle of nowhere," Singh said. "He then asked me and this bad man to get off the bus."

Singh pointed out to the driver that it was not his fault he was being harassed!

"I said, you're asking me to get out here, with this man?"

But an African-American woman came to Singh's support and asked him not to get out of the bus.

"She said to me, 'Son, don't get off this bus. I know what you've been going through. We've been through this before." Singh recalled. "She said, 'history repeates itself.'"

Fortunately, the situation took a new turn. "The guy was angry that the driver asked him to get off ," Singh said. "I was lucky. The guy hit the driver like the way he hit me. And the driver got angry too and punched the guy in the face," Singh gestured how the driver hit the man back. "Then he called the cops."

In a few minutes, [Pennsylvania state] troopers surrounded the bus. They boarded it and talked to the driver, Singh, the attacker and some other

passengers. "Then they handcuffed the man and took him away," Singh said.

"They asked me to come with them to file a report but I said I was not interested." Singh wanted to forget the whole nightmarish episode.

Singh’s own Woodside Shri Guru Ravidass temple has been the subject of bias attacks. On the night of August 3, another Sikh man and his family became victims of a bias crime in front of their home.