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Rathfarnham
Dublin community protests against racism following attack on Afghan family
Two men and a teenage boy were set upon by a gang of men and told to “go back to your own country” last week.
A SOUTH DUBLIN community has come together to demonstrate in solidarity with a local family following an apparent racist attack.
200 locals assembled last night at the Nutgrove Shopping Centre in Rathfarnham in protest at the attack on the Ahmadzai family, who are originally from Afghanistan, last Thursday evening as they returned from a local park.
The three who were attacked, brothers Naqeeb and Fazalrahman and their 13-year-old nephew Abdul, were present at the demonstration and thanked locals for their support.
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Local People Before Profit TD Bríd Smith addressed the protest and said it’s “really important that the communities respond, not the police, not the politicians”.
“Otherwise it becomes acceptable, to beat up a few guys on the way home from the park, because nobody said anything, because nobody did anything about it,” she said.
That’s why I think in every incident we have to come together as a community to respond.
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A Garda investigation into the initial incident has been launched. Up to five men in a car pulled up in front of the trio, who were returning from the park on bicycles.
Abdul had previously told RTÉ’s This Week that the men then got out of their car and starting punching him and his uncles in the face. One had a black metal weapon, he said.
“They hit me with it, I feel dizzy and I don’t know what happened.”
He said the men told them to “go back to your own country”.
They told me: “I know you live in Loreto”, so many times “I know you live in Loreto”. At the end they said “that was just a warning and we’ll see you next time and we will kill you”.
The boy said witnesses tried to intervene and have handed over photo and video evidence to gardaí.
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