The recent stabbing of a 23-year-old Palestinian American in Texas meets the standard for a hate crime, police announced on Wednesday.
Bert James Baker, 36, was arrested on Sunday for allegedly attacking 23-year-old Zacharia Doar after Doar and friends were returning from a pro-Palestinian protest on Sunday near the University of Texas at Austin.
In a Wednesday update, the Austin police department said that the Sunday stabbing does “meet the definition of a hate crime”.
Information on the case will be provided to the Travis county district attorney’s office, which will then make the final decision on whether to pursue hate crime charges against Baker, according to the police department’s statement posted to Facebook.
In an earlier statement, Austin police said they believed the attack was “bias-motivated”.
Baker is accused of stabbing Doar after the 23-year-old and his friends were driving back from a pro-Palestinian protest on Sunday, the Associated Press reported.
According to an arrest affidavit detailing the incident obtained by the AP, Doar and three others were riding in a truck when Baker, who was on a bike, opened the doors of the vehicle and began yelling racial slurs at the group.
The group then got out of the vehicle and approached Baker, who first punched Doar in the shoulder. After a scuffle, Baker stabbed Doar in the rib.
Doar’s father, Nizar Doar, told NBC News that Baker had actually dragged Doar out of the truck and initially charged at Doar’s friend with a knife. Doar was stabbed when he attempted to intervene in the attack.
In an earlier statement prior to Wednesday’s update, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) accused Baker of initially attempting to remove a flagpole with a keffiyeh scarf reading “Free Palestine” from the truck Doar was riding in.
Doar was also one of four Muslim Americans in the car when Baker allegedly attacked.
Doar was hospitalized after the attack with non-life threatening injuries. His father told NBC that Doar was stabbed three inches from his heart and sustained a broken rib from the attack.
Baker was arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and vehicle. He is being held in jail on $100,000 bail as of Thursday, AP reported.
Richard Gentry, Baker’s attorney, was unavailable to provide comment to the Guardian.
In a statement to the Guardian, Cair’s deputy executive director, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, called Sunday’s stabbing “the latest in a series of violent attacks on Muslim and Palestinian Americans” and praised the Austin police department for “recognizing the hateful motive for this stabbing”.
“These attacks, the bigoted rhetoric that inspires them, and the Gaza genocide at the root of this violence, must end,” Mitchell said.
The latest attack is the most recent example of violence facing Palestinians in the US since the 7 October attack in Israel by Hamas. Threats of violence against Muslim and Arab Americans have also surged in recent months.
In November, three Palestinian college students were shot and injured in Vermont after they say a man specifically targeted them for being Palestinian.
