The 17-year-old American Muslim girl, beaten and abducted after leaving a mosque in Virginia on Sunday by a man, has been murdered and her body found dumped in a pond.
The police have arrested the man on suspicion of murder, Reuters reported.
The attack spurred an outpouring of grief and horror in a Muslim community that has been gathering to pray at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society mosque about 30 miles outside Washington in observance of the last 10 days of Ramadan.
The attack happened early on Sunday 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 counties.
At around 3 p.m., the remains of a female believed to be the teen victim were found in a pond in Sterling, police said.
During the search for the missing teen, authorities stopped a motorist “driving suspiciously in the area” and arrested the driver, later identified as identified as Darwin Martinez Torres, 22.
Police obtained a murder warrant that charges Torres for her death, the Fairfax County Police Department said.
A police spokeswoman told reporters the attack followed some sort of dispute between the man and the girls, and 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 in 2016 to 2,213, up from 1,409 in 2015, the Council on American-Islamic 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 anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Read more: Reuters
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