ATTACKS ON INDIANS-AUSTRALIA

May 11th, 2010 by Ravi Matah | Posted in News   Comments Off on ATTACKS ON INDIANS-AUSTRALIA
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Attacks on Indian students have gone unabated in Sydney and Melbourne. After a relative lull in attacks on Indians in Australia, there have been attacks on Indian students during the month of April 2010 and two of them in the last week of April alone. An Indian student was robbed, brutally bashed up and racially abused in a fresh incidence of violence Down Under.
                                                              
According to, The Age, 23-year-old Neeraj Bhardwaj was viciously attacked near Melbourne Aquarium, close to the city police headquarters, at Melbourne, by two drunk men when he was waiting for a tram at 4 a.m. (local time) on Easter Monday after a night out.

The assault left Bhardwaj with a damaged left eye, broken nose, headaches and sore ribs. He said the doctors told him his left eye had lost “80 to 90 per cent” of its capacity and might never recover.

A 24-year-old youth was beaten up by three unidentified assailants in Westmead, New South Wales, police said. Merrylands Police said the man was walking along Amos Street at 7.30p.m. on Wednesday when three men came from behind him and repeatedly hit him in the face.

“The blows forced the man to the ground where he was set upon by three attackers who began kicking him,” The Daily Telegraph quoted a police spokesperson, as saying.

“When a passenger from a passing taxi stopped to assist the victim, one of the assailants stole the assaulted man’s wallet, containing a small amount of money, and the attackers fled on foot towards the Parramatta Golf Club,” it added.

In another incident, Baljinder Singh, 25, was attacked on Monday night when two men carrying weapons approached, the ‘Herald Sun’ reported.

The attackers demanded money and as Singh was searching through his bag to hand over his wallet he was stabbed in the abdomen. Singh screamed for his life, his attackers laughed and fled the scene, the report said.

“I bent down and one guy stabbed me,” Singh said adding “I just wanted to save my life and yelled “just don’t kill me.”

Singh is recuperating from emergency surgery at the Alfred Hospital.

Police officer Darrell Allen said it was an “opportunistic crime”, but was not racially motivated.

A youth from Andhra Pradesh, Shravan Kumar, a 25-year-old student, who was attacked with a screwdriver over the weekend along with his three friends is in the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital  and doctors are “not very optimistic” about chances of his recovery, Indian Consul General here Anita Nair said.

Attacks on Indian students have been going on for the last two years, but have increased manifold since May 2009, wherein two deaths and an attack on Gurdwara, a Sikh temple, had also been reported.

The Australian Police maintain that these attacks are opportunistic crimes and are not racially motivated.

The Government of India is trying to obtain the details of these cases from their counterpart in Australia.

Ravi Matah.

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