The Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling on legal authorities to investigate a threat against a mosque in North Carolina as a hate crime.
According to Queen City News, a call came into the Islamic Center of Charlotte on Tuesday, May 23. The caller made anti-Islam and anti-Arab statements. At one point they said, “I’ll blow you worse than 9/11.”
Jibril Hough, a spokesman for the center, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officer told the center that the call was untraceable, The Charlotte Observer reports.
The Observer says it used public phone records that are available online to track some of the phone numbers to parts of the Greenville-Spartanburg area of Upstate South Carolina. They say one of the callers apologized. The other claimed that a 14-year-old family friend “did something stupid” by making the call from his office.
CAIR would like authorities to continue investigating the call.
“Law enforcement at the state and national level should investigate the apparent threat to the Islamic Center of Charlotte as a hate crime and take appropriate action,” CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said in a press release. “If the caller has indeed apologized for his actions, that is a welcome first step, but this person must also face accountability for violating the law just like anyone else who threatens a house of worship.”
AsAmNews is published by the non-profit, Asian American Media Inc.
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