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Attack investigated as possible bias crime

BY ANDREW STRICKLER | andrew.strickler@newsday.com

March 21, 2008

Police are investigating what they called a possible bias attack in Brooklyn in which a Jewish man was robbed and beaten before one of his attackers was hit by a car.

Uria Ohana, 25, an assistant rabbi, said Thurday that he entered the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street subway station in Park Slope on his way to a lecture in Manhattan on Tuesday evening when a young man, one of a group on the platform, grabbed his yarmulke from his head and ran for the exit.

Ohana said he chased the man to the street, where the man darted between two parked cars and was struck by a passing vehicle.

As a crowd formed around the injured man, two of his attackers' acquaintances ran up and confronted him, Ohana said.

"When they saw him injured, they started screaming, 'Look what you did' and they punched me in the head," he said.

The two men who attacked him and a handful of others then jumped into a sport utility vehicle and fled, he said.

Ohana, who grew up in Israel and lives in Wellesley, Mass., said he believes the men targeted him because he is Jewish. "They were yelling 'Allahu akbar' which literally means 'God is great.' But it was the symbolic meaning that frightened me," he said.

The injured man, whom police identified as Ali Hussein, 18, was arrested and charged with petty larceny, fourth-degree grand larceny, and fifth-degree criminal possession of stolen property, according to police and the Brooklyn district attorney's office.

Hussein remained at Lutheran Medical Center in Sunset Park yesterday and had not yet been arraigned. Police are still searching for at least two other men involved in the attack.