North Carolina Muslim killings spark wider debate about religious hatred

The murders of three Muslim students in the university town of Chapel Hill in North Carolina has sparked a debate about race relations in the United States that has spread overseas, to the UK and the Middle East, about whether the killings were as a result of religious hatred.

Deah Shaddy Barakat (23), his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha (21) and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha (19) were shot dead shortly after 5pm on Tuesday in their apartment near the University of North Carolina. Neighbours called police to report hearing gunshots and screams reverberating through the apartment complex.

Mr Barakat was a student at the university’s graduate school of dentistry and his wife was due to enrol in the school later this year. Her sister studied at North Carolina State University. All three were born in the US and were Muslims of Arab descent. Mr Barakat was a Syrian American and his wife and sister in law Palestinian American.

Tributes have been paid to the three students. Barakat had raised at least $10,000 to provide dental care to Syrian war refugees, a figure that has risen to more than $140,000 on the fundraising website since the killings. His sister in law was a talented videographer and artist.

The couple’s upstairs neighbour Craig Stephen Hicks (46), a former car parts salesman who was studying law at nearby Durham Technical Community College, has been charged with murder. He is alleged to have killed the three students with execution-style shots to the head.

The details around why he is alleged to have killed the three students are still being investigated but in the vacuum left by uncertainty there has been outcry, making the discussion subject, #muslimlivesmatter, a trending topic worldwide on social media, once again raising the vexed issue of race relations in the US.

The topic is a variation of the “Black Lives Matter” that went viral after the killings of unarmed black men Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York last year.

An Arab hashtag translated as “Chapel Hill Massacre” has also been generating the interest of many thousands of social media users in the Middle East as the debate has spread far beyond America’s borders.

North Carolina police attempted to play down early suggestions that religion was a motive for the killings. They have said an ongoing dispute about parking at the apartment building appeared to be the cause, but have also refused to rule out that this may be a “hate crime”.

For Namee Barakat, father of the male victim, Dr Mohammad Yousif Abu-Salha, the psychiatrist father of the two women, and other relatives of the three slain students, there was little doubt in their minds about motive. They were quick to call the murders a hate crime.

Dr Abu-Salha said his daughter, who wore a Muslim head scarf, had told him that she and her husband had been harassed by Mr Hicks and that he had previously made complaints to the couple about making noise and how their visitors had used car- parking spaces.

At their apartment complex there were car-parking spaces on Mr Hicks’s side of the building, not to the rear, where the couple lived.

The dead women’s father said Yusor had told him a week ago that she had a “hateful neighbour” and that he despised the couple for “what we are and how we look.”

"This was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime. This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt," Dr Abu Salha told the North Carolina newspaper the News & Observer.

“And they were uncomfortable with him, but they did not know that he would go this far.”

The killings come days after the White House generated criticism and debate over President Barack Obama’s comments in an interview with news website Vox published on Monday that many felt suggested that the anti-Semitic attacks on a Paris supermarket last month were “random.”

Mr Obama’s press secretary Josh Earnest later clarified the comments saying the attack at the Kosher market was “motivated by anti-Semitism” and that the president didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.