Man held for murder of abducted American Muslim girl

WASHINGTON: A 17-year-old American Muslim girl was beaten and abducted after leaving a mosque in Virginia on Sunday by a man, who police later arrested on suspicion of murder after her body was found dumped in a pond, authorities said.

The attack spurred an outpouring of grief in a Muslim community that has been gathering to pray at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society mosque, 50km from here, in observance of the last 10 days of Ramadan.

The attack happened after the victim and several friends walking outside the mosque got into a dispute with a motorist in the community of Sterling, the Fairfax County Police Department said in a statement. At one point, the motorist got out of his car and assaulted the girl, police said.

The teen was reported missing by her friends, who scattered during the attack and could not find her afterwards, touching off an hours-long search by authorities in Fairfax and Loudoun.

Around 3pm, the remains of a female believed to be the teen victim were found in a pond in Sterling. During the search for the missing teen, authorities stopped a motorist “driving suspiciously in the area” and arrested the driver, later identified as Darwin Martinez Torres, 22. Police obtained a murder warrant charging Torres with her death.

A police spokesman said authorities had not ruled out hate as a motivation for the attack.

The number of anti-Muslim bias incidents in the United States jumped 57 per cent last year to 2,213, up from 1,409 in 2015, the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations advocacy group said in a report last month.

While the group had been seeing a rise in anti-Muslim incidents prior to Donald Trump’s stunning rise in last year’s presidential primaries and November election victory, it said the acceleration in bias incidents was due in part to Trump’s focus on militant Islamist groups and antiimmigrant rhetoric. Reuters