Hate crimes against British Muslims in the week after the terrorist attack in Manchester went up by five times, figures reveal.
In total, 139 cases of “anti-Muslim hate” were reported to Tell Mama, an organisation that records such crimes, in seven days — compared with 25 in the previous week.
A British-born, seven-year-old girl was among the 61 victims of verbal abuse, which included Muslims being labelled “child killers” and told to “go back to your country”.
In one case, revealed by The Sunday Times last week, Naveed Yasin, a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon who helped save the lives of victims of the bombing, was racially abused and labelled a “terrorist” on his way to work at Salford Royal Hospital.
Other incidents reported to Tell Mama during the same week included a woman from Southampton whose veil was ripped from her head and a man struck with a glass bottle. Most of the attacks were in Greater Manchester and London.
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The rise in hate crimes is part of a pattern after terrorist attacks. The murder of Lee Rigby, a soldier, in southeast London in 2013 led to an almost four-fold increase in Islamophobic crimes in the following week.
That figure was surpassed in the week after the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015 in which 130 people were killed. Tell Mama recorded a 400% increase in hate crimes then.
However, last month’s attack by Salman Abedi, a British-born Muslim who killed 22 people and injured scores more, had led to an unprecedented 456% jump, said Tell Mama’s director, Iman Atta.
“Obviously, people are angry and they should rightly be,” she said. “That anger, though, should be targeted at countering and challenging extremism where people see it, instead of against innocent citizens who happen to be Muslim.”
A Muslim mother who was verbally abused while travelling with her seven-year-old daughter on a bus in east London said her daughter had been rattled by the offensive language and hostility. “It was very shocking for both of us and also very frightening,” the woman said. “A child’s mind is very fragile and I don’t want her growing up to hate white people. She is half-white British herself and both she and I were born here.”
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However, Commander Mak Chishty, who is responsible for developing community relations in London at the Metropolitan police, said: “The majority of Britain stands together in the wake of terrorist incidents, as we have seen in Manchester.”