Elham Asaad Buaras
A 25-year-old man has handed himself in to police on October 19 after video footage emerged that appeared to show a man screaming Islamophobic abuse at a Turkish pensioner, and then seeming to throw his walking frame out on to the pavement.
The video emerged days after another incident where mother-of-three Simone Joseph was caught on camera Islamophobically abusing a pregnant Muslim woman on a bus in Brent. Joseph, 36, pleaded guilty to causing racially aggravated distress after the footage went viral online.
The incident involving the Turkish pensioner, the passenger, who had a young child with him, appears to shout at the pensioner: “Go back to Turkey.”
The video also appeared to show obscene remarks about the victim’s daughter, wife and sister during a five-minute tirade on a packed bus in Tottenham, north London, with a significant ethnic Turkish population, on October 17.
“This video footage – which includes racist and Islamophobic abuse – has been brought to the attention of the [police],” the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
The three-minute-long video, which appeared on the 5Pillars website, showed the assailant shouting at a man on the bus.
“Nobody understands you! Go back to Turkey and talk that s…That’s why you are here! F… free benefits on a walker,” the suspect is heard saying.
The video then shows the man throwing the walker – seemingly belonging to the victim – from the bus before leaving the bus with a child’s buggy.
The news of incident comes on the same day a woman pleaded guilty at court to another Islamophobic incident on a London bus on October 13.
In a statement to The Muslim News a spokesman for Metropolitan police confirmed Joseph “pleaded guilty to causing racially/religiously aggravated intentional harassment/alarm/distress, contrary to section 31(1)(b) and (4) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 on October 19.”
Joseph, called Muslim Hanane Yakoubi, an “Isis bi#ch” and told her to “go back to your f@cking country” while travelling with her two-year-old child on a London bus.
Yakoubi, who Joseph threatened to “kick in the uterus”’, said she was struggling to sleep following the incident, and added that “I cannot take medication because I am pregnant… I do not know how to ask for help because I do not speak the language.”
The mother-of-three, handed herself in after footage of the incident, which was posted to Facebook by Mico Abrigo, went viral, and pleaded guilty to the charge at Hendon Magistrates Court .
She will now appear at Hendon Magistrates’ Court on November 13 for sentencing.
