Police are investigating a second suspected hate crime against a Muslim this week in Canada
Police in the Canadian province of Ontario are investigating a second possible hate crime against Muslims since last Friday’s terrorist attacks on Paris, which left at least 129 dead and hundreds injured.
A Muslim woman was picking up her children from school in Toronto on Monday when she was allegedly attacked and robbed, Global News reports, the attackers yelling “terrorist” and “go back to your country.”
“She’s very taken aback, she received multiple shots to her stomach, to her face, we’re worried about her internal situation right now,” the woman’s brother, who asked not to be named, told Global News. “That’s the school I went to, that’s the school she went to. We were born and raised here, our parents came here 40 years ago, 45 years ago, and we’re not going anywhere.”
Police are investigating another incident on Saturday as a possible hate crime, in which a mosque in Peterborough (north of Toronto) was fire bombed.
“I have noted with deep regret a number of highly disturbing acts aimed at certain Canadians, including the fire at the mosque in Peterborough, the smashing of windows at a Hindi temple in Kitchener, and the attack on a Muslim woman in Toronto,” Canada’s newly-elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement today. He also reiterated that Muslims are also being persecuted by the Islamic State, the terrorist group that claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks.
Muslim Canadians have noticed a backlash against them since the Paris attacks, CTV reports. “In the last 24 to 36 hours there are at least 4 reports (of attacks) and we don’t know how many are not reported,” Munir Pervaiz, the president of the Muslim Canadian Congress, told the news channel. “And we can easily attribute it to what happened in Paris.” Pervaiz referred to another attack on a Hindu temple that may have been misdirected Islamophobia and an incident where “Muslims Go Home” was written on a wall across from a Muslim family’s home in Toronto.