The students were reportedly all wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh when they were attacked.
A suspect was arrested on Sunday following the shooting of three Palestinian students near a university campus in Vermont in the United States, according to media reports.
In a statement, the Burlington police announced that Jason J Eaton, 48, was arrested Sunday afternoon near the crime scene.
Hisham Awartani is a Palestinian American junior at Brown University, described as a math genius. He was shot by a white man yesterday in Vermont along with his friends Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmed. The 3 students were wearing kuffiyehs.
There are fears Hisham may not walk pic.twitter.com/S0vngfTrDf— Dena Takruri (@Dena) November 26, 2023
“The victims – Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, all 20 years old – are undergraduate students at Brown University, Haverford College and Trinity College respectively, and were on their way to Awartani’s grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving dinner when a white man with a handgun fired on them,” the British Guardian newspaper reported.
According to the police, two students are reportedly in stable condition, but the third received “much more serious injuries” in the spinal cord.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said on X: “We have reason to believe that the shooting was motivated by the three [victims] being Arab.”
The students were reportedly all wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh when they were attacked.
Three Palestinian college students were shot in Vermont, while wearing Keffiyehs.
Let’s tell the world what Keffiyehs are all about. pic.twitter.com/uXmzqxTmx9
— Arjun Sethi (@arjunsethi81) November 26, 2023
In a statement, the families of the three students said that they were “devastated by the horrific news.”
They called “on law enforcement to conduct a thorough investigation, including treating this as a hate crime.”.
The incident comes amid a reported rise in Islamophobia in the United States, following the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza on October 7.
Three #Palestinian university students were shot on Saturday in Burlington, #Vermont, in what authorities described as a "hate-motivated crime".
Police characterized the gunman, who is still at large, as "a white man with a handgun."
"Without speaking," according to the police,… pic.twitter.com/Lc9Ce7ACzv
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) November 27, 2023
According to a report published in Voice of America on November 17, “the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil rights organization, reports an ‘unprecedented surge in bigotry’ since the war started.”
“Between October 7 and November 4, the group received 1,283 requests for help and complaints of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias, an increase of 216% over an average 29-day period last year,” the report also said adding:
“CAIR said more than 15% of complaints fielded by its national office involved alleged hate crimes.”
(The Palestine Chronicle)
