Three Muslims Gunned Down in Indiana, US Media Shrugs

By teleSUR

29 February 16

Some believe the identies of the deceased — young, Black and Musllim — has led the media to ignore the story.

olice in the U.S. have yet to establish a motive for the "execution-style" murders of three young Muslim-American men, in a case that has barely been mentioned in mainstream media in the United States.

23-year old Mohamedtaha Omar, 20-year old Adam Mekki and 17-year old Muhannad Adam Tairab were found dead in a house in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Wednesday after suffering multiple gunshot wounds.

Police wouldn’t confirm how many times they had been shot.

The men hail from Africa's eastern Sahel region and were attending a gathering at a house frequented by teens and young adults of Chadian and South Sudanese descent.

Although local police have opened a homicide case they have received little evidence to suggest the killings were linked to the victims' ethnicity or religion, therefore they are not treating it as a hate crime.

"We’re pretty certain they weren’t targeted due to that," said Fort Wayne Public Safety Director Rusty York, according to the local Journal Gazette.

"Hopefully, you know, we'll be able to focus in on exactly what the reason was, but as I said before, no reason to believe this was any type of hate crime, or focused because of their religion or their nationality whatsoever," he told 21 Alive news.

The murders have received a small amount of press coverage when compared to other homicides that have occurred recently in the U.S.

Last week, Jason Dalton drove around the Michigan city of Kalamazoo and randomly shot six people dead in a case that has been covered widely, both in the U.S. and abroad. And on Thursday, three people were killed and at least 14 others wounded by a gunman in a series of shootings in Kansas.

The shootings were picked up by mainstream outlets such as CNN which omitted coverage of the slayed Muslims in Fort Wayne. Some media critics argue it is the identity of those killed — young, Black and Muslim — that has the made their deaths less newsworthy in the mainstream press.

Hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. have tripled in the past year, with a large number of physical and verbal attacks coming after Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump said he supported a "shutdown of all Muslims entering the United States."

“There have been reports of anti-Islamic attacks across the country wherever Muslims live. Girls wearing hijabs have been harassed. Mosques have been defaced and targeted by arsonists. One Muslim woman was menaced by a man with a knife. A Queens shopkeeper was beaten-up by a customer shouting anti-Muslim slurs,” NBC news reported back in December after Trump's remarks.

Wednesday’s murders came just over a year after three Muslim-American students were shot dead at a residential complex at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.