CHICAGO – Police in the United States have arrested a 71-year-old man for murdering six-year-old boy and seriously wounding his 32-year-old mother, who are Palestinian-American.
Police said the Muslim family were targeted because of their faith and as a response to the war between Israel and Hamas.
“Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” the Will County Sheriff’s Office in suburban Chicago said in a statement on Sunday.
It said the officers found both victims on Saturday morning at a home around 65km southwest of Chicago, adding that the minor was pronounced dead at the hospital as he was stabbed 26 times with a large military-style knife.
Police said the mother had more than a dozen stab wounds on her body. She is being treated at a hospital and she is expected to survive.
Meanwhile, CAIR National, American’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, has condemned the incident.
“We are shocked and disturbed to learn that a landlord in Chicago expressing anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian views broke into a Muslim family’s apartment and attacked them with a knife, injuring the mother and killing her 6-year-old son, Wadea Al-Fayoume,” it wrote on microblogging site X.
We are shocked and disturbed to learn that a landlord in Chicago expressing anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian views broke into a Muslim family's apartment and attacked them with a knife, injuring the mother and killing her 6-year-old son, Wadea Al-Fayoume. @cairchicago will hold a… pic.twitter.com/N0ILuevq4n
— CAIR National (@CAIRNational) October 15, 2023
The Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Palestinian racism being spread by politicians, media outlets, and social media platforms must stop, it added.
On the other hand, death toll of Palestinians in Gaza has surged to 2,400 as Israel continues to pound the region with air strikes.
Israel tells Palestinians to leave Gaza within 24 hours; Hamas defies order
