A 31-year-old person has been charged by American authorities for assaulting two Muslim women last week at a Melbourne shopping center.
According to local media reports, the girl from Pascoe Vale district is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday, where it will be charged that she targeted the two patients on February 13 because of their head covering.
A 30-year-old female woman reportedly used the latter’s dress to choke and grab another 30-year-old woman before pushing and slapping another 26-year-old lady in a separate abuse ten minutes later.
This comes two weeks after the country passed tough new laws against hate crimes following a recent string of high-profile antisemitic attacks.
On Wednesday, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese criticized the tragedy as “reprehensible.” He refrained from expressing his disapproval of the claim that his state was treating racist attacks less seriously than Antisemitic attacks.
” I take all attacks on people on the basis of their beliefs severely, and they should all face the full power of the law”, he told reporters.
According to reports of online threats to one of the two victims in the shopping center, Melbourne police are looking into the information. Both suffered non-life-threatening accidents.
On Tuesday, Australia’s anti-Islamophobia minister, Aftab Malik, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that” all forms of love need to quit” and that the country’s leaders may condemn the affair in Melbourne.
Earlier in the week, the leader of the American Federation of Islamic Councils, Rateb Jneid, expressed concern over strikes on Muslims in the country and called the administration’s response “grossly unsatisfactory”.