Pakistani Sailor Kiss Case Drama Angers Activists
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Activists from New York’s Pakistani community criticized city officials yesterday for turning over the case of a Pakistani sailor arrested for the forcible kissing of an underage girl during Fleet Week to the Pakistani Navy.
The low-level charge was not even deemed a criminal offense by Manhattan prosecutors last week, but, if convicted of the charges in a Pakistani military court, the sailor stands to face 14 years in the brig.
“In this country there’s all this talk about justice – this is not justice,” a leader of the Pakistani community, Mo Razvi, said yesterday. Mr. Razvi is executive director of an immigrant advocacy group in the largely Pakistani section of Midwood, the Council of People’s Organizations. “If the crime is committed here, the punishment should be here as well,” he said.
The legal drama surrounding the Pakistani sailor, Nadeed Ahmed, unfolded during meetings Tuesday morning between high-ranking officials from the U.S. Navy and prosecutors from the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau.
Mr. Ahmed, 30, was arrested Friday in Central Park after a 14-year-old, in town on a school trip from Massachusetts, accused him of grabbing her hand and then forcibly kissing her on the mouth. She flagged down police officers and identified Mr. Ahmed during a search of the park in a patrol car.
The sailor was taken into custody and faced a potential harassment violation, a non-criminal offense with a maximum $250 fine and 15-day jail sentence. He is currently in custody aboard his ship PNS Tippu Sultan, returning to Pakistan.
Mr. Ahmed’s case quickly became an international affair, with the U.S. Navy wanting to hand it over to Pakistani officials. A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, Barbara Thompson, said prosecutors had been “urged” by Navy officials to comply in the Pakistani Navy’s request to take on the case. A spokesman for the U.S. Navy, Chris Zendan, said it felt compelled to satisfy the Pakistan Navy’s request to take on the case, in part because both countries were “committed to fighting the war on terrorism.”
“It’s truly a frightening tale,” the director of a public-advocacy law firm that represented the sailor, Caroline Wilson, said of the case.
