Shooting of three Palestinian men in Vermont investigated as possible hate crime

Police in Burlington, Virginia, on Sunday investigated the shooting of three students of Palestinian descent as a possible hate crime, the city’s mayor said.

The three victims, all men in their 20s and students at U.S. universities, were walking near the University of Vermont on Saturday when they were shot and wounded by a white man with a gun, police said in a statement on Sunday. Two of them wore Palestinian kaffiyeh.

Two of the victims were in stable condition; the third suffered much more serious injuries, authorities said.

“At this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect that it was a hate-motivated crime,” said Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad.

Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger added in the statement that the possibility that the shooting could have been motivated by hate was “chilling” and that the investigation was focused on that.

Burlington police said they were still working to identify and locate the shooter on Sunday. They added that other than the fact that the students are of Palestinian descent and that two of them were wearing kaffiyeh, they had “no additional information that could suggest the suspect’s motive.”

Mr. Murad said in the statement that he has already been in contact with federal authorities in case investigators determine the crime was motivated by hate. But he added that they had limited information, and urged the public not to draw conclusions “based on statements from uninvolved parties who know even less.”

Burlington police did not release the names of the victims, but said two of them are U.S. citizens and the third is a legal resident. The men’s families identified them in a statement as Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmed.

This is what the Ramallah Friends School, a private school in the West Bank, says in a Facebook post that all three men had been students there. They are now juniors in college: Mr. Awartani is a student at Brown University, Mr. Abdalhamid at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Mr. Ahmed at Trinity College in Connecticut.

According to Marwan Awartani, a great-uncle and former Palestinian Authority education minister, the three walked to Mr. Awartani’s grandmother’s house for dinner. He said the three took a photo together and sent it to Hisham’s parents minutes before they went to dinner.

Marwan Awartani added that the bullet that hit Hisham hit his spinal cord and he lost feeling in the lower body.

Mr. Ahmed was shot in the chest and Mr. Abdalhamid had minor injuries, according to a statement from the victims’ families.

The families urged authorities to investigate the shooting as a hate crime.

“Why would anyone shoot children wearing Palestinian kaffiyeh?” Marwan Awartani said in an interview.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said its offices have received a dramatic increase in reports of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias since Oct. 7, the day Hamas attacked Israel. The Anti-Defamation League said so the end of Octoberr that there was also a significant increase in the number of reported cases of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism and assault compared to the previous year.

“This has got to stop,” Husam Zomlot, head of the Palestinian mission in the United Kingdom and a friend of the families, said in a phone call Sunday, pointing to the 6-year-old boy who was fatally stabbed in Illinois last month. in what authorities said was an anti-Muslim attack.

The federal government this month opened discrimination investigations at six universities following complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic harassment. The Biden administration opened the investigations as part of “efforts to take aggressive action to address the alarming nationwide increase in reports of anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and other forms of discrimination,” according to a press release published by the US Department. from the Education Office for Civil Rights.

On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said it was “deeply disturbing that three young Palestinians were shot here in Burlington, VT. Hate belongs here and nowhere. I look forward to a full investigation.”