Muslim man brutally beaten in alleged hate crime incident near Toronto

A Mississauga man was brutally beaten in front of his wife and two young daughters in an alleged road rage incident last Sunday night, which police are now investigating as a possible hate crime.

Muhammed Abu Marzouk, 39, was pulling out of the parking lot of Mississauga Valley Community Centre after attending a picnic with his family on the night of July 15 when two men who were walking behind his car started shouting “f--king Arab people! Terrorists!”, his wife Diana Attar told CBC News yesterday.

The two men accused Abu Marzouk of not seeing them as he backed out of the parking spot, and allegedly proceeded to kick the car. Peel Region police claim that they have no evidence anyone was struck by Abu Marzouk’s car before the assault began.

It’s still unclear as to exactly how the physical violence started.

Attar, 30, says that when her husband got out of their family vehicle to speak to the men, one of them punched him in the face. She recalls pleading with the men, telling them not to hurt her husband, that she has two little girls — but to little avail. The beating continued while Attar ran to find help and she returned to find her husband on the ground, losing consciousness, with a pool of blood around his head.

Attar told CBC that as she leaned over to hold her husband, she was kicked by the men too.

“You don’t keep kicking a man when he’s down laying in the ground in a pool of his own blood,” Abu Marzouk’s younger brother Ahmed told multiple news outlets a day after the incident. “You don't keep kicking a man's wife trying to cover her husband's head laying on the ground.”

Two brothers aged 19 and 27 from Brampton, Ontario have been charged with one count of aggravated assault and two counts of assault — they appeared in court on Monday morning. The assault was initially categorized by Peel Police as road rage, the result of simple dispute in a parking lot. But upon talking to witnesses, police confirmed that they were now investigating the incident as a hate crime.

“I’m shocked by how brutal and barbaric this was, how merciless this beating was,” Ibrahim Hindy, the imam of Dar Al-Tawheed mosque in Mississauga where Abu Marzouk and his family pray, told VICE News. “Look, one of the reasons this has really struck a chord with people in the community is because it wasn’t very surprising, we knew this would happen at some point.”

The most recent data of hate crimes in Canada shows that between 2014 and 2015, the number of hate crime-related incidents jumped five percent. In fact, nearly 50 percent of all hate crimes reported in the country were motivated by hatred of race or ethnicity, according to Statistics Canada.

Hindy claims that at least from anecdotal accounts of residents who attend the Dar Al-Tawheed mosque, there’s been a sharp surge in the number of racist incidents targeting Muslims in the Mississauga area. “I think that people who are motivated by hatred are feeling much more emboldened to act on it,” he said. “I was told that even as those two Brampton guys were being arrested, they continued yelling at Abu Marzouk’s friends and family.”

Abu Marzouk remains in critical condition in St. Michael’s hospital, with three major fractures to his skull and a significant brain hemorrhage. “We’re still not sure how badly his brain has been damaged,” Hindy said.

A fundraising page set up in support of Abu Marzouk’s family, states that he was the sole breadwinner for the family and that his recovery may take several months. “Funds raised from this campaign will be utilized by the family to pay for day to day living expenses.”