“What a thing to wake up to!' Amara Majeed wrote on Facebook. 'This is obviously completely false and frankly, considering that Muslim communities are already greatly afflicted with issues of surveillance, I don’t need more false accusations and scrutiny.”
Amara Majeed sits in her advanced placement biology class at Towson High School in Maryland in February 2015. By Antonia Noori Farzan Antonia Noori Farzan Reporter for the Morning Mix Email Bio Follow April 26 at 6:37 AM Amara Majeed had an unpleasant surprise waiting for her when she awoke on Thursday morning.
Police issued a retraction later on Thursday, saying that they had included the wrong photo and that Majeed, 22, was not wanted for questioning. But the blunder had already revealed the limitations of Sri Lanka’s nationwide ban on social media, which was supposed to stop the flow of misinformation.
— Kasun Gunasekara April 25, 2019 Despite an official ban on social media, word spread throughout the day on Thursday, and Majeed woke up to a deluge of hatred. A public Facebook status that she posted on Wednesday — notifying her friends that Brown was looking to hire a new Muslim chaplain — was bombarded with hundreds of comments. While some speculated that there could have been a mistake, others called her foul names or accused her of being a terrorist.
Amara Majeed has been falsely identified as a terrorist that is accountable for the recent attacks in Sri Lanka. The gruesome comments on her facebook post are nothing but a demeaning act of pure hatred.— Fazlullah Mubarak April 25, 2019 The error came as Muslims in Sri Lanka braced themselves for retaliation and potential violence amid a government investigation into Islamist militant groups’ role in the bombings.
Amid the confusion, officials also walked back their estimates for how many people had died in the Easter Sunday attacks. In the aftermath of the bombings, the official death toll rose over several days to reach 359, The Washington Post’s Siobhán O’Grady reported. If correct, that would make the attacks one of the deadliest acts of terrorism since 9/11.
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