Islamic leaders are questioning Virginia detectives’ insistence that the beating death of a teenage Muslim girl appears to have been a case of road rage, saying the attack looks all too much like a hate crime.
Nabra Hassanen, 17, was bludgeoned with a baseball bat early Sunday by a motorist who drove up to about 15 Muslim teenagers as they walked or bicycled along a road, Fairfax County police said. A Hassanen family spokesman said all the girls in the group were wearing Muslim headscarves and robes.
Darwin Martinez Torres, a 22-year-old from El Salvador suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, was jailed without bail on a murder charge after the girl’s body was pulled from a pond near his apartment.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on Islamic-American Relations, said there is a strong possibility the crime wouldn’t have happened if the teenagers weren’t Muslim.
“You can’t just say ‘Oh, he didn’t say anything against Islam, so no hate crime,'” he said.