Families, police at odds on post-Sept. 11 deaths

Randa Karas believes that her husband, a shopkeeper in California, was murdered because he was an Arab. Manisha Patel thinks her uncle, a motel owner in Florida, was killed by someone too ignorant to realize that he was a Hindu from India -- and neither Arab nor Muslim.

But police say there is no evidence that either of these killings were, as the victims' families firmly believe and the media have widely reported, part of a post-Sept. 11 backlash against people from the Middle East.

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division lists nine killings across the country as "possible hate crimes" in revenge for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The private Council on American-Islamic Relations considers eight deaths to be part of the backlash. Another nonprofit organization, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, puts the figure at six.

Yet homicide detectives and prosecutors working on these cases say they have hard evidence that only one or, possibly, two killings in the United States since Sept. 11 were motivated by anti-Arab or anti-Muslim bias.

The notion that there has been a rash of retaliatory murders across the country, some investigators say, is an urban myth driven by antidiscrimination campaigners, sensational media reports and traumatized crime victims seeking some explanation for senseless acts of violence.

For their part, many families of post-Sept. 11 murder victims believe that police are reluctant to recognize and pursue hate crimes, a complaint that African-Americans have made for years.

"I think white Americans did this, and because of that, there's no investigation," said Durre Hasan, whose husband, Waqar, was shot to death at his grocery store in Dallas. "If my husband was a white American and some Asian, Muslim or black shot him, they would find that person within two days."

Some civil libertarians say the precise number of murders caused by the post-Sept. 11 backlash is unimportant.

"If there were three or four murders instead of six or nine, that's not going to change my view of what happened," said Hussein Ibish, communications director for the antidiscrimination committee. "We're still talking about an explosion of hate crimes."

Determining the motive for violent crime can be a tricky business, as the post-Sept. 11 killings show.

In many instances, police say, news reports first raised the issue. "The assumption, especially among the broadcast media, is that if someone with an Arabic-sounding name is found dead, then it has to be a hate crime," said Seattle detective Cloyd Steiger.

On Sept. 15, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, two Hispanic men ran from the International Market, a Los Angeles grocery store owned by Adek Karas, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Egypt. Karas, 48, staggered out and collapsed on the sidewalk from a gunshot wound. His killers have not been identified.

Randa Karas is convinced that her husband, a Coptic Christian, was mistaken for a Muslim. "I'm sure it was a hate crime," she said.

The sheriff's department investigator on the case, Detective Richard Ramirez, said because there were no witnesses inside the store, police have no way "to get into the mind-set of these perpetrators."

In 2000, the FBI reported 33 anti-Islamic hate crimes across the country, including four aggravated assaults and no murders.

In the four months since Sept. 11, by comparison, federal authorities have investigated more than 250 incidents of violence or serious threats against Muslims, Arabs and South Asians, including numerous assaults and firebombings.

"I don't think there is any doubt that the numbers have gone up meaningfully since September 11th. That's the bad news. But the good news is that in the past month, they have fallen virtually off a cliff, practically to none," said Assistant Attorney General Ralph F. Boyd Jr., head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

Boyd said federal charges have been brought in seven cases, and state or local charges in about 60 cases. So far, however, prosecutors and police have officially labeled only one post-Sept. 11 death a hate crime: the killing of Balbir Singh Sodhi on Sept. 15 in Mesa, Ariz.

Two days after the Arizona shooting, another Indian-American businessman was slain. Jayantilal Patel, 45, a Hindu, was found gagged, bound and beaten at the motel he owned and operated in Haines City.

The manager of a restaurant in the motel's courtyard, Sean Russell, 23, and his girlfriend, Kimberly Williams, 20, were arrested a month later in Las Vegas. They confessed to killing Patel, stealing his money and fleeing in his car, according to Frank Talbot, the assistant state attorney who is prosecuting them for first-degree murder.

"My own belief is that (religious or ethnic bias) doesn't have anything to do with it. It was murder for money," Talbot said.

The victim's niece believes otherwise. "We don't want to think too much about racism, but it does occur. If it was a robbery, you don't have to kill him," Manisha Patel said.

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