Robe rage: UAE tells travellers to shun Arab clothes after gun-toting Ohio police swarm tourist mistaken for terrorist
The United Arab Emirates has warned its citizens against wearing traditional Arab clothing while travelling in the West, after an innocent medical tourist was swarmed by Ohio police with rifles levelled at him as he stood in white robes outside a hotel.
UAE officials said Sunday that travellers from the Arab country should “refrain from wearing the national dress” in public places while visiting the West “to ensure their safety” and said that women should abide by bans on face veils in European countries, according to news reports from Dubai.
The tourist, stroke victim Ahmed al-Menhali, was detained at gunpoint last Wednesday in Avon, Ohio, after a suspicious hotel clerk alerted relatives told relatives about the man, who called 911.
Menhali, a 41-year-old businessman, was in the United States for medical treatment and tried to book a hotel in the Cleveland suburb. He was wearing a flowing white headscarf and a full-length white robe at the time. Screaming police swarmed him, pinned him to the ground with a knee to his neck and handcuffed him outside the hotel entrance while he was speaking on his phone in Arabic.
He later told the broadcaster Al Jazeera that the clerk heard him speaking the foreign language and apparently concluded he was “pledging my allegiance to ISIS,” referring to the Islamic State.
“The UAE cares for the safety of its citizens and, therefore, demands clarifications about this incident,” it said in a statement carried by WAM state news agency.
Goldrich “apologised” for the incident, pledging to get clarifications from authorities in the state of Ohio, WAM said.
Menhali said, quoted in The National daily: “They were brutal with me. They pressed forcefully on my back. I had several injuries and bled from the forceful nature of their arrest.”
A police video posted by a Cleveland TV channel showed the arrest. Menhali, who was in the US to seek tretment in the wake of a stroke last year, collapsed at one point, apparently feeling ill, and emergency workers took him to a hospital.
Police and town officials later apologised for the incident, calling it “very regrettable.”
The arrest comes in the wake of the attacks in Orlando last month and San Bernardino last year in which Muslim attackers pledged loyalty to the Islamic State.
The Ohio incident also came to light one day after terrorists in Bangladesh attacked a coffee shop and bakery in a cosmopolitan district of the capital, Dhaka, in an attack that left 20 hostages dead.
Muslim activist groups in the United Sates expressed alarm at the Ohio incident, calling it another example of bigotry and heightened Islamophobia. But some people posting on social media defended the police response in Ohio.
“I am very sympathetic to Muslims, but come on,” one person commented on a news story about the incident. “I feel bad this gentleman became ill. However, because of actions of MUSLIMS ... then yes everyone is gonna have to pay at least for a while.”
Anti-Muslim incidents have spiked in the United States on the back of deadly IS attacks in the West that prompted presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
