In a racially-motivated attack, a young Sikh professor from New York’s prestigious Columbia University was pounced upon and punched and kicked by a group of teenagers, dubbing him “Osama” and “terrorist”.
The attack in the Manhattan neighbourhood of Harlem on Saturday night left Prabhjot Singh with a fractured jaw and badly bruised. One from the group pulled Singh’s beard, while others hit him on the head and kicked him.
An assistant professor at Columbia and director of Systems Design at the Earth Institute besides being a resident physician at a leading New York hospital, Singh was taken to Mt Sinai Hospital and treated for his injuries, including undergoing surgery on his jaw.
Simran Jeet Singh, a friend of the victim, wrote in the Huffington Post that Prabhjot Singh was the victim of a hate crime that took place as he went for a walk after dropping his wife and one-year-old son at home following dinner.
The two of them had jointly written an op-ed piece in The New York Times last year, calling on the FBI to track hate crimes against Sikhs.“He (Prabhjot Singh) recounted the scariest moment, seeing a young male put his arm inside his coat, as if reaching for a gun.
He also remembered people pulling at his beard,” Simran Jeet Singh wrote, adding: “He couldn’t provide any descriptions about his assailants, and it seemed to me that in some way, he didn’t want to remember them.”
The city website Buzzfeed quoted Prabhjot Singh as saying in his first comments after the brutal attack that he “doesn’t remember much about the suspects — except that most were African-American”.
The Sikh-American, however, had no complaint against his neighbourhood, saying: “This is my community, I live in Harlem, I see patients here. It’s not the side of Harlem I’ve come to know and not how I’ve been embraced.”
“Unfortunately his assailants did not see Prabhjot Singh, the professor, the community health expert or the local doctor. They saw a man wearing a beard and a turban - his articles of faith - and saw a target. Sadly, for many other Sikh Americans like Prabhjot, this is a story they have heard and experienced before,” Simran Jeet Singh wrote in his blog.
The New York Police Department said the attack was being investigated by the Hate Crimes Task Force. It said the attackers were all on bicycles.