Man arrested in attack on state rep. after Muslim holy gathering

A Muslim Connecticut state representative was injured in an attack outside of an Eid al-Adha prayer gathering on Wednesday, police said.

A bystander chased down the male suspect and detained him before he was arrested by Hartford police, authorities confirmed to local media.

Representative Maryam Khan, the first Muslim member of the Connecticut House after being elected last year, sustained minor injuries, Farhan Memon, Connecticut chair of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told Newsweek in a phone interview Wednesday night.

Newsweek has reached out via email to Khan and the Hartford Police Department for comment.

Officers received a call at roughly 11 a.m. Wednesday that a man had assaulted a woman. When police arrived, they found the suspect, identified as 30-year-old New Britain, Connecticut, resident Andrey Desmond, being detained by a civilian bystander, Hartford police told NBC Connecticut.

Desmond faces charges of third-degree assault, unlawful restraint, breach of peace and interfering with police, authorities said.

Khan, her three children, her sister, and a female friend had just left the Eid al-Adha gathering when the attack occurred, she told CAIR, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization. Eid al-Adha commemorates the Islamic Prophet Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s order, according to CAIR, which adds that the holy day is celebrated with prayer, small gifts for children, distribution of meat to the needy and social gatherings.

The lawmaker said that when the suspect first approached them, he made “vulgar and obscene remarks,” Khan told the advocacy group, adding that he “grabbed and hit her and threw her to the ground” outside the prayer gathering held at the XL Center in Hartford.

“When I spoke to her this afternoon, she said that her face was bruised, and her neck has started to hurt a lot,” Memon told Newsweek. “And there is the emotional trauma as well, which I can’t even begin to imagine, not only what happened to her but also trying to protect her kids and her sister when this man started harassing them.”

Memon said Khan told him she was trying to get her kids out of harm’s way.

“She didn’t know what this man was going to do, whether he was armed or not,” he said. “So, she basically tried to put herself between the man and the rest of her family and as a result, suffered the injuries that she did.”

Memon said the local Muslim community is concerned about the lack of police presence at the prayer gathering, which he said drew thousands of people. He said security and police were “nowhere to be found” when the incident occurred, adding that Khan and her sister were screaming for help and no one aided them until the one bystander ultimately chased and detained the suspect.

Memon said that while they don’t know the motive for the attack, he added, “Unfortunately, Muslims are targets.”

“Maryam believes that it was her ‘Muslimness’ that triggered that individual and, you know, in terms of the things that he said, although they weren’t overtly Islamophobic they were sort of sexual in nature,” he said to Newsweek. “And she thinks that, you know, given that she was identified as a Muslim woman because she was wearing a headscarf that perhaps he thought that she was an easy target.”