Lahore: A Pakistani student at Australia’s Newcastle University was on Wednesday morning beaten up in an armed robbery on campus.
An Australian newspaper reported that Abdullah Qaiser, 21, suffered injuries including a nose bone fracture that may require surgery. He was driving a car to the university library on the Callaghan campus when the attack took place. The newspaper quoted him as saying that he saw six or seven people standing on the road blocking his path near the university’s Medical Science building. As soon as he stopped, a woman in the group reached through the passenger door and tried to grab his mobile phone, while a man pulled open the driver’s side door and yelled at him, “Go back to your country, you don’t belong here”. The man then punched Qaiser with his hand wrapped in a knuckle-duster, leaving him with a broken nose. The group took the cell phone and fled the scene.
Though the assailants were reported as shouting at him to leave Australia, the police and the victim both agreed that the attack did not seem to be racially motivated. Qaiser was quoted in the newspaper as saying that the incident turned racial when the attackers saw him up close. “I was in the car, how would they know I was a brown person in the car? It could have been anybody,” he said.
Further, he told the newspaper that he had arrived in Australia a year ago ‘hoping to study in a secure environment’.
“I came over here because I believed it was pretty secure,” he said, “I’m from Pakistan, you know what’s happening in Pakistan, people come here to get a better education, to be a bit secure. So when this kind of thing happens, it’s pretty sad.”
Qaiser said that as soon as he recovered from the trauma induced after the attack he drove to the university gym where staff administered first aid and called the police as well as the campus security and an ambulance.
Police were reported as saying that investigators were reviewing CCTV footage from the campus grounds.
Published in Daily Times, August 9th 2018.
