ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Police in Michigan on Wednesday debunked a Muslim student’s allegation that was widely cited as an example of a spike in anti-Muslim incidents in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory.
The woman reported in mid-November that a man approached her near the University of Michigan campus and threatened to set her on fire if she didn’t remove her hijab. The Ann Arbor Police Department said in a statement that “following a thorough investigation, detectives have determined the incident in question did not occur.”
Michigan’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said at the time that the reported incident was “just the latest anti-Muslim incident” since Trump’s Nov. 8 win.
On Wednesday, after police released their findings, CAIR’s national spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, said the apparently false report shouldn’t be used to discredit what he called the “many, many incidents of anti-Muslim hate.”
But he also stood by assertions that the number of actual threats against Muslim rose after Election Day.
“If you have a spike in reports, you will have some increase in false reports,” he said.
After a report of the alleged Nov. 11 incident, the university issued a crime alert that said the woman took off her hijab and left the area. And police said the suspect was a white man with an “unkempt appearance” and “intoxicated with slurred speech.”
