The sheriff’s office said a motive for the stabbing of a mother and her son was “them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis.”
A 6-year-old Palestinian American boy was stabbed to death in his Illinois home by his landlord, who also critically wounded the boy’s mother in an alleged anti-Muslim hate crime, police said Sunday, calling it a “senseless and cowardly act of violence.”
Wadea Al-Fayoume was stabbed 26 times at his Plainfield home by Joseph Czuba, 71, Saturday, investigators said. He died at the hospital.
His mother, Hanaan Shahin, 32, was stabbed more than a dozen times, authorities said, adding that she is at a hospital and is expected to survive.
“Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” the Will County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.
Czuba was arrested and charged by the Will County Sheriff’s Office after police say they determined he stabbed the child and mother because they were Muslim and because of the ongoing situation in Israel.
Before the boy’s funeral prayer service Monday at the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, Illinois, the child’s father, Odey Al-Fayoume, speaking in Arabic, said he hopes something good can come out of his son’s slaying.
“I’m here because I’m the father of the boy, not because I’m a political person or a religious person or anything. I’m here as the father of a child whose rights were taken from him,” Al-Fayoume said.
Source : NBCN
