NYPD Investigating Similar Incidents After Muslim Women Set on Fire in Midtown

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — The police are searching for a man who reportedly lit a 35-year-old woman's sleeve on fire Saturday night outside of the Valentino store in Midtown, the NYPD said. The woman was wearing traditional Muslim garb, according to the New York Daily News, which quoted police sources. However, an NYPD spokesperson on Monday would not speak to whether she was wearing so-called "traditional Muslim garb."

At 8:58 p.m., a woman called in to the police that she was walking on the sidewalk when she felt something warm on her left arm and noticed her blouse was on fire. She was able to pat out the fire and she wasn't injured, but she immediately saw a man standing next to her with a lighter. The man walked away eastbound on 54th Street without saying anything, an NYPD spokesperson said.

The NYPD Hate Crime Task Force was called to the case, police said.

Police said Wednesday they had found out about two other similar incidents that occurred the same night. At 8:45 p.m., five people (two women and three men) approached a woman at 727 Fifth Ave. A man wearing a white T-shirt came up from behind her and appeared to ignite a lighter next to her leg, police said. The woman appeared to be uninjured, and she walked north towards East 57th Street while the group walked southbound on Fifth Avenue, police said.

At 10 p.m., two women were walking down the staircase to the D/F train platform at the 42nd Street-Bryant Park train station when a man placed a flame near their arms, they told police. The women said the man was black, around 6 feet tall, wearing a white T-shirt and holding a black backpack and a lighter, they said. They also saw he was "in the company of others," according to the police. When the two women boarded the F train heading north to Queens, the group of people fled, the women recounted.

Police released video early Tuesday morning of the suspect leaving the original scene.

Last Thursday, a 32-year-old woman named Emirjeta Xhelili allegedly attacked two Muslim women and their two infants in a hate crime in Brooklyn. Xhelili shouted at them, "this is the United States of America, you're not supposed to be different from us," according to court documents. She faces four charges, including assault as a hate crime. She tried to rip the women's hijab from their heads, smacked them in their faces and bodies, and knocked over one stroller with an infant in it and rattled another, court documents said. Xhelili is being held on $50,000 bond, or $20,000 cash bail.

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