Veiled Muslim woman sues New York police for removing headscarf

September 17, 2015 Science & Faith

New York, (IINA) – A Muslim woman who was forced to remove her hijab in the street and later for a mug shot is suing the City of New York and its police department, seeing the act as a clear breach of her religious constitutional rights, OnIslam reported.
The 53-year-old woman, who is of Egyptian origin, was describing her feeling after being forced to remove her headscarf by NYPD cops last January.
The police arrested the Muslim woman earlier this year after getting into a dispute with a neighbor over a parking space outside her home in Glendale.
According to the 25-page complaint, filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, the neighbor knocked Soliman out after calling her “terrorist.”
When the police arrived, they arrested her and removed her veil while she was being placed in the ambulance.
When she was asked to get her veil back, the cop refused and a nurse gave her a pillow case to cover her head.
“I feel like somebody took all my clothes off,” the Plaintiff, Mervat Soliman, told Daily News on Wednesday.
“This is America, we don’t care,” an officer told her when she objected while getting her picture taken without a veil, she said.
NYDP also ignored her plea to have a female officer take her picture in a private room.
“Instead, Mervat’s photograph was taken in the well of central booking in plain sight of multiple male officers and staff,” the suite added.
On his part, a spokesman for the city Law Department said: “The suit will be reviewed.”
A similar dispute over parking space in the American State of North Carolina has ended up with the brutal murder of three Muslim youth last February.
Since 9/11, American Muslims, estimated between six to seven million, have become sensitized to an erosion of their civil rights, with a prevailing belief that America was targeting their faith.
An Economist/YouGov poll found that a 73 percent of Americans believe that US Muslims are victims of discrimination amid recent attacks against the community.
SM/IINA