AP News, May 26th, 2007
A teenager was charged with a bias crime after authorities said he forcibly removed a Sikh student's turban and cut off his hair in a school bathroom, authorities said Friday.
Umair Ahmed, 17, was charged with unlawful imprisonment, menacing and aggravated harassment, all under hate crime statutes, said Kevin Ryan, a spokesman for the Queens district attorney. Ahmed also was charged with criminal possession of a weapon.
Bail was set at $7,500 at an arraignment Friday evening. An after-hours phone call to his attorney, Francis Imperato, was not immediately returned, and there was no telephone listing at the address for Ahmed that police provided.
Sikhism calls for men to wear their hair long, and many wear turbans.
Ahmed and the Sikh youth, who is 15, were trading insults Thursday at Newton High School when the younger boy tried to apologize, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. Ahmed told the boy he would accept only a haircut as an apology.
Ahmed then dragged him into a bathroom, pulled off the boy's turban and cut his hair while two other students acted as lookouts, Kelly said.
No one else was charged, Ryan said.
"The defendant is not accused of some schoolhouse prank, but an attack on the fundamental beliefs of his victim's religion and his freedom to worship freely," Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown said.
Ahmed faces faced up to seven years in prison if convicted.
School officials did not return a telephone message left Friday. Another Sikh student said there was generally little religious or ethnic tension among students there.
"There are no problems at this school at all," said the student, Sukhrit Kaur, 18.
