LONDON (AA) – A Muslim woman subjected to racist abuse on a British train has praised her fellow passengers for defending her.
Ruhi Rahman, 23, from Newcastle in northeast England, said a man on her train approached her and told her to get out of her seat because she might “bomb the train”.
In a post to her Facebook account, she recounted how the man told her and her sister “this is my country”, and added: “Your [sic] bombing different countries and don’t deserve to be here or in this country.”
But Rahman, who wears a hijab, said she was supported by passengers, including a number of football fans wearing replica shirts. The passengers told the man to exit the train and burst into applause when he left at the next station.
“The women [sic] beside me started to cry because she was so disgusted with his comments and she said no one should go through this and everyone also gave me a hug,” she wrote.
“It made me smile and appreciate how lovely they all were.”
She later told Newcastle’s local Chronicle newspaper: “He shouted ‘get up out of that seat’ at me. I was shocked at first because I didn’t really know what was happening.”
“He was then saying stuff like ‘this is my country’ and my sister told him we were born here and it was our country too,” she told the Newcastle paper. “It was then the other passengers started getting involved, telling him to leave us alone. Then he said to them ‘what, do you want her to bomb this train?’”
Rahman said it felt like she had “loads of angels” near her.
DB Regio Tyne and Wear, which operates the Metro services in the area, said a police investigation had begun and it was urging witnesses to contact them.
The incident is the latest case of anti-Muslim abuse on public transport in the U.K.
Earlier this month, a London man was jailed for 16 weeks after shouting anti-Muslim abuse at an elderly Turkish man on a bus. In a separate incident, a woman was given a suspended sentence for calling two Muslim women “ISIS bitches”, a reference to the Daesh terror group in Syria.
Author: Michael Sercan Daventry
[Photo: Muslims praying Friday prayer in Parliament Square in London on October 9, 2015. Photographer: Tolga Akmen/
Anadolu Agency]