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Newsday – May 9, 2006
Muslim mosque leaders claim
police profiling on Triborough bridge
By Pat Milton
NEW YORK -- Six leaders of a mosque said Tuesday that city transit officials handcuffed and detained them following a traffic stop on a bridge because they are Muslims.
The officials of the Dar Ul Islah Mosque, in Teaneck, N.J., said they were made to line up along a Triborough Bridge roadway and handcuffed behind their backs while passing motorists gawked.
"We were made a spectacle," said Igbal Khan, of Paramus, N.J. "We had caps and beards. I am sure people were thinking, 'They finally got those terrorists."'
The men demanded at a news conference that the agency that runs the bridge, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Bridges and Tunnels division, provide religious sensitivity training to its police officers. They also said they planned to file a civil rights lawsuit for what their attorney Devereauz Cannick called "Muslim profiling."
A spokeswoman for the MTA's Bridges and Tunnels, Catherine Sweeney, said the men's van was stopped after police radar picked it up traveling 70 mph in a 40 mph zone. She said the agency was looking into the discrimination charges.
The six men said they were on their way to a breakfast meeting at a mosque in Queens at around 7 a.m. on April 9 when their van was stopped at a foot of the Triborough Bridge system, which comprises three bridges, a viaduct and approach roads connecting the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens.
The driver, Syed Hazari, of Teaneck, said he gave the officer his license and registration and the officer returned to his police cruiser. Within minutes, he said, five other police cars arrived and officers ordered the vans' occupants out.
Khan said he and the other men are U.S. citizens and longtime residents of the United States.
"There is no explanation for this except for religion," Khan said. "It was humiliating."
The men said they were taken in separate police cars to a station house, uncuffed and forced to wait while the driver was questioned in another room. They said one of the officers told the men they were detained because Hazari's name was on a list of names that demanded further inquiry.
After the men were released, the officers "were very apologetic," Hazari said.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--profilingclaim0509may09,0,1382211.story
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