Three people have been arrested after an imam and his wife were forced off a road and attacked south-east of Melbourne.<\/p>\n
Victoria Police said the couple were driving on \ufeffSouth Gippsland Highway in Dandenong South on Saturday night when the attack started.<\/p>\n
A group of three people driving in a black hatchback allegedly blocked the couple’s car, forcing them into a nearby service station.<\/p>\n
The three people are then accused of getting out of their car and racially abusing the couple and damaging their vehicle.<\/p>\n
The imam, \ufeffwho the Board of Imams Victoria identified as \ufeffBosnia-Herzegovina Islamic Society Noble Park Mosque’s Ismet Purdic, hopped out of the car and was allegedly assaulted.<\/p>\n
Passersby who witnessed the incident stopped to intervene when the three suspects jumped back into the car and left.<\/p>\n
Purdic condemned the “outpouring of hate”.<\/p>\n
“\ufeffThank god my children stayed at home. I can’t imagine how horrible it would have been if the children had seen and experienced this,” he said.<\/p>\n
Today, police said two men and a woman were arrested in Dandenong South yesterday\ufeff.<\/p>\n
The men, aged 22 and 23 from the Cranbourne area,\ufeff were charged with criminal damage and common law assault.<\/p>\n
The older man was remanded in custody to face \ufeffDandenong Magistrates’ Court today while the younger man was bailed and will appear at the same court in May.<\/p>\n
The 18-year-old woman from \ufeffDandenong South was release pending summons.<\/p>\n
Victoria Police said: “\ufeffThere is absolutely no place for prejudice-motivated, religious based or hate-based behaviour in our society and such activity will not be tolerated.”<\/p>\n
Multicultural Affairs Minister Ingrid Stitt said this alleged “violent, racist, Islamophobic and misogynistic violence has no place in Victoria and our government condemns it unequivocally”.<\/p>\n
“No Victorian should have to worry about whether they are safe driving down the street,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Racists will always seek to divide us, but our strength is in our diversity, and we must always stand up to it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three people have been arrested after an imam and his wife were forced off a road and attacked…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":509896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4740,50],"class_list":{"0":"post-509895","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115879902143818849","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}