In the early morning on July 9, 2004, a fire burned much of the Continental Spices Cash & Carry, a grocery store in Everett, Washington, specializing in Pakistani, Indian and Middle Eastern groceries. The fire caused an estimated $50,000 in damages but no injuries. On putting out the fire, police and firefighters found a gasoline can, a spray-painted obscenity against Arabs and a spray- painted white cross. Rupinder Bedi, the proprietor of a 7-Eleven next door, told the Seattle Times how he found Continental Spices’ manager, Mirza Akram, 37 and a Pakistani, crying and telling him “he had been harassed by some customers earlier this summer [and that] the verbal slurs didn’t stop until he threatened to call police.”
Further, the Everett Herald reports,
The morning of the fire, the store manager told investigators he feared the fire had been set in retaliation for attacks on Americans in the Middle East. He claimed that the month before, two white men came to the store and became upset when they learned he had been born in Pakistan. They left the store angry.
That was the story. On August 19,
however, the police arrested Akram in his store on a federal arson warrant.
He stands accused of setting fire to the store to collect insurance on
the building and its contents. U.S. attorneys explained in court that mounting
financial losses led Akram to stage an arson and then make it look like
a hate crime.
Specifically: Akram was in the
process of buying Continental Spices from the Z.A. Trading Corp. of Seattle;
having already paid $52,800, he owed at least another $32,200. But gross
sales at Continental Spices dropped from almost $11,000 a month in 2003
to less than $3,000 a month just prior to the fire, a decline in revenues
that apparently made it impossible to make the monthly purchase payment
of $640 and rent payment of $1,200.
Wrongly thinking Z.A. Trading Corp.’s
insurance policy covered the store, Akram allegedly schemed for months
to burn it down. (Ironically, the store was not on the policy.) On the
evening of July 8. he met with an unnamed male friend (who has since turned
state’s evidence) at his home and told the friend how he had poured gasoline
inside the store and lit incense above the gasoline, expecting the incense
would ignite the gasoline.
Akram allegedly had the friend
drive to the store in the early morning of the 9th to see if it was on
fire. He called Akram and reported that is was not. Then, about 4 a.m.
on July 9, the friend entered the store and dropped burning incense into
the gasoline, causing a fire to erupt so fast that it burnt the friend’s
trousers. He “narrowly escaped” the building without injury.
Phone records obtained by investigators
show 11 calls between Akram and his friend between midnight and 4 a.m.
on the day of the fire. If convicted of arson, Akram faces up to 20 years
in prison.
While Akram is presumed innocent
until proven guilty, this tale points once again to (1) the need to treat
claims of “hate crimes” with less than total credulity and (2) the unreliability
and poor judgment of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Immediately
on July 10, CAIR rushed a press release out the door, “Arsonist Torches
Muslim Store in Washington,” calling on “local and national leaders to
address the issue of growing Islamophobic prejudice following an arson
attack on a Muslim-owned business in Washington State.”
That mainstream organizations persist
in treating CAIR as a serious “civil rights” group baffles this observer.
What more must CAIR do to make them realize what it is?