(Washington) A 71-year-old man was charged with murder and hate crimes on Sunday after stabbing a Muslim woman and a six-year-old boy near Chicago in the northeastern United States, an attack that police said to be linked to the war between Israel and Hamas.
The child, who suffered 26 stab wounds, died at the hospital, but the 32-year-old woman, believed to be his mother, is expected to survive, according to a statement from the Will County, Illinois Sheriff’s Office , who called the attack “heinous.”
“Investigators were able to determine that the two victims of this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect because they are Muslim and because of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East involving Hamas and the Israelis,” the statement said, which specifies that the killing took place approximately 64 kilometers west of Chicago.
The sheriff’s office did not give the nationality of the victims, but according to the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) the child is Palestinian-American.
The woman managed to call 911 while fighting off her attacker.
“Deputies located the two victims inside the residence, in a bedroom. Both victims had multiple stab wounds to the chest, torso and upper extremities,” the sheriff’s statement said.
During the autopsy, a serrated military knife with a 15 cm blade was removed from the child’s abdomen.
The head of CAIR’s Chicago office, Ahmed Rehab, told reporters that the assailant knocked on the victims’ doors and first tried to choke the woman, telling her: “You Muslims must die,” citing text messages sent by the woman to the murdered boy’s father from his hospital bed.
The war between Israel and Hamas, which has left thousands dead on both sides, was sparked after a bloody and unprecedented attack launched on October 7 by Hamas against Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip under its control. of the Palestinian Islamist movement.