The driver accused of deliberately running down and killing a Muslim teenager in the US had an anti-Muslim slogan on his SUV, it has been reported.
The man, Ahmed H. Aden, 34, has been charged with first-degree murder in what police suspect was a hate crime.
The FBI also has opened a case “as a federal civil rights investigation as a potential hate crimes violation,” a spokeswoman said.
Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein, 15, was hit by the SUV outside a Somali community centre in Kansas and then also run over.
His legs were nearly severed and he died in hospital, The New York Times reported.
Witnesses told police they had seen a black SUV painted with anti-Muslim threats drive past the centre on several occasions in the weeks before the crash.
“Islam is worse than Ebola,” one of the messages said, a teenager told the NYT. “I would have thought the police would have taken care of it, but they didn’t,” he said.
A police spokesman told NBC News patrol officers saw the vehicle in October with the message “Quran is a virus” and what appeared to be a misspelled “worse”, followed by “than Ebola” on a back window. The same message was still there when the vehicle slammed into the teen, he said.
Mohamed Farah, 50, a friend of the boy’s family, said he had called the police more than once in October about a suspicious man who had been hanging around the centre.
“I feel like I lost a part of my body,” he was quoted as saying.
Aden reportedly initially told police he had lost control of his vehicle. He later said he had struck the teenager because he looked like a man who had threatened him several days earlier, court documents show.
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