A Saudi female student fears for her life after she faced a racially motivated attack in a Dublin bus last Tuesday.
Mashael Khayyat, who is pursuing a PhD at the Computer Science Dept. at Trinity College, said she boarded bus No. 7 at the Trinity College bus stop heading to Cabra Road to pick up her daughters from school.
Suddenly an Irish man approached her and started making racial comments. He then hit her on the shoulder, saying: “I hate Muslims.”
Khayyat, who was wearing the hijab, ran to the bus driver and asked him to call the police. “The police came and registered a case,” she said.
“I am not hurting people with my hijab. I went to my daughters with full of fear because I saw his anger and hate with no reason,” said Khayyat, who taught as a lecturer at Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz University (KAU).
“I don’t feel safe now… Please do something to stop this. We do not want the case of the killed Saudi student (who was veiled) in the UK to be repeated here in the peaceful land of Ireland,” she said in a written statement, referring to the killing of Nahid Almanea in Essex last year.
Khayyat, a scholarship student, is in the final year of her postgraduate studies. She has been living in Dublin with her husband and two daughters for the past three years.
There have been several cases of racial attacks on Saudi students abroad. Scholarship student Raed Al-Bugshi was found dead in Michigan last October.
The same year Hamad Saleh Al-Yami, another Saudi student, was attacked in Birmingham. There are more than 150,000 Saudi students currently studying in 30 different countries.
