Indian taxi driver attacked in Australia
The racial mood is slowly changing in Australia also. Many attribute this to ‘Trump effect’ but I don’t know what provoked them
In a suspected case of racial attack, an Indian taxi driver from Kerala was attacked by a group of teenagers in Hobart in Australia’s Tasmania state early Sunday.
Li Max, hailing from Kottayam, had to be admitted to the Royal Hobart Hospital with deep wounds on his face and chest.
Li told his relatives that he was attacked without any provocation. He said when he stopped his car near a McDonald’s outlet, he saw three youths were arguing with an employee but they soon turned their ire on Li.
“Among the three, a big boy in black T shirt yelled racial abuses and attacked me without any provocation. I was literally shocked. Soon two others also joined, raining blows on me. Before leaving, they poured water on bleeding wounds,” Li told a Malayalam news channel.
He said he had been was working in Hobart for eight years and never had such a bitter experience. “While hitting me they were using choicest racial abuses. Nobody intervened when I was attacked and later they sped away in their vehicle,” he said.
“The racial mood is slowly changing in Australia also. Many attribute this to ‘Trump effect’ but I don’t know what exactly provoked them,” he said, adding recently another Indian driver was humiliated in a similar fashion but he refused to file a police compliant. Li was discharged later in the day.
This is the second such incident in a week. Last Sunday, a priest from Kerala, Tomy Kalathoor, was stabbed inside a church in Melbourne while he was attending a Sunday mass. Australian police later said the assailant was a mentally deranged man. External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj had condemned the attack and directed the Indian consulate to render all help to the priest.
Two sisters, aged 10 and 12 years, were raped and murdered in a village under Mohammadi Kotwali limits here, police said.
Additional superintendent of police Dipendra Nath Chaudhary said the post-mortem revealed sexual assault. He said attempts were on to nab the suspects.
Their bodies, with deep injury marks around their necks, were recovered early in the morning from the fields on the outskirts of their village on Sunday.
They went missing on Saturday evening after they had gone to the field for some work.
Superintendent of police (SP) Manoj Kumar Jha, Chaudhary and deputy SP LD Bharti rushed to the spot and inspected the scene of crime.
Bharti told HT that a bloodstained razor was recovered from the scene of crime.
“On the complaint of the father of the deceased girls, an FIR of murder has been lodged against one Quayyum and his two relatives Mahtab and Guddu,” Bharti said.
He said investigation had been started as a team of forensic experts, besides sniffers dogs had been called in to gather evidence.
The two sisters had gone to the fields on Saturday afternoon to collect wheat from the harvested fields as village children often do. When the two sisters did not return home till late evening, their parents looked for them and intimated the local police.
On Sunday morning, some villagers spotted the bodies of the two girls lying in a pool of blood in the fields, about 1km away from the village. They informed the parents and the police.