[wvns] Night Of Aasiya's Beheading

Night Of The Beheading
by Asra Q. Nomani
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-02-28/the-night-of-the-murder/

In a Daily Beast exclusive, Asra Q. Nomani uncovers horrific new details about the evening Muzzammil Hassan allegedly murdered his wife while their young children waited in a nearby car. Plus, new details about the history of their abusive marriage—including a police report from a family trip.

On the night of Feb. 12, 2009, Aasiya Hassan was allegedly murdered and beheaded by her estranged husband, Muzzammil Hassan, inside the building of the American-Muslim TV venture, Bridges Network Inc., they operated together.

While the alleged murder took place, the couple's two children—four-year-old Rania and six-year-old Danyal—were waiting for their mother in a car outside the building, along with Muzzamil Hassan's 17-year-old son from an earlier marriage, according to people familiar with the details of the case.

It isn't clear where the children were when police discovered their mother's body, but the account is a reminder that domestic violence often has devastating consequences for children when it goes untreated. Police records—including this report from Flower Mound, Texas—show that the Hassan family had been struggling with Muzzammil Hassan's abuse long before the alleged murder took place.

According to the police report, Muzzammil Hassan "coerced her into a bedroom." In the bedroom, she said, he "pushed her down onto the bed, sat on her chest and pinned her arms and legs down."

Muzzammil Hassan, a prominent member of Buffalo's Muslim community, had for years battled a psychiatric illness that led to violent rages when he went off his medication, according to people familiar with his medical history. His two previous marriages were also marred by abuse allegations, according to people familiar with the relationships.

On the night of Assiya Hassan's alleged murder, Muzzammil Hassan lured his wife to the TV station on a pretense, possibly to sign papers, according to the people familiar with the case. Aasiya Hassan had filed for divorce on Feb. 6, 2009, securing a protective order against her husband, and, according to the people familiar with the situation, she couldn't be in the building if he was there. He told her that she should look for his vehicle in the parking lot and proceed inside if she didn't see it, according to the account.

The people familiar with the case said, Aasiya Hassan drove with Muzzammil Hassan's teenage son, Michael, from his first marriage, and the two young children she had had during her marriage to Muzzammil Hassan. According to community members, Michael and his older sister, Sonia, 18, were very close to their step mother, Aasiya Hassan.

At the studio, the people said, Aasiya went inside. Some time later, Muzzammil emerged from the building, to Michael's surprise. He walked over to Michael and the young children and handed Michael $4,900 in cash, saying, "You will probably need it." A person familiar with the case said the police took the money as evidence.

According to the account, Michael, a high school senior, tried to open the locked windowless, steel entrance door to the building, and tried to call his older sister, Sonia, a freshman at the University at Buffalo.
According to police records, Muzzammil Hassan went to the Orchard Park police station at 6:15 p.m. to tell police officers they could find the murdered body of his wife at the Bridges studio. His lawyer in Buffalo, Jim Harrington, has said he didn't confess to the crime, and he declined to comment on details of the case. The police station is just a few minutes drive from the studio. Ted Gura, assistant police chief in Orchard Park, declined to comment. Erie County District Attorney Frank Sedita declined to comment.

Unable to reach his sister, Michael started to call others, the people familiar with the situation said, but by then Orchard Park police arrived on the scene and discovered the grisly scene inside. It's not clear how Muzzammil Hassan would have been able to remove evidence of the crime, if he committed it, but a former Bridges employee said that the men's room has a shower inside.

According to people involved with the proceedings, the case is expected to go to the grand jury in Erie County, New York, courts next week.

As more details emerge about the family's secretive private life, it's clear that the family had long been grappling with Muzzammil Hassan's alleged abuse. On New Year's Day 2007, for example, Muzzammil allegedly left Aasiya Hassan's car in the parking lot of a car dealership outside town to keep her from leaving their home.

According to New York State police spokeswoman Rebecca Gibbons, the state police was dispatched to the Lia Honda dealership parking lot in Clarence, N.Y., not far from Orchard Park, for "a report of an abandoned vehicle," a 1999 Plymouth Voyager. The trooper contacted the residence, she said. The report said that the "vehicle was left there overnight following a domestic." The incident was between Muzzammil Hassan and his wife, people familiar with the situation said. The spokeswoman said the car was left there "in an attempt to keep her from leaving."

Almost two years before the alleged murder, on March 26, 2007, a family court judge in Erie County, N.Y., ordered Muzzammil Hassan to complete "co-parenting" and "anger management" classes at, interestingly, Catholic Charities, a social service agency with offices in Buffalo and the surrounding area. The American-Muslim community doesn't offer any similar services in the area. A spokeswoman from Catholic Charities wasn't available for comment.

In the Flower Mound, Tex., case, Aasiya Hassan went to the local police station during a visit to her in-laws in the summer of 2007, seeking to have Texas police enforce the New York protective order. The report said that on Monday, July 2, 2007, at 8:37 p.m., Aasiya Hassaan arrived at the station with her brother-in-law. He wasn't named in the report.

In the lobby of the police station, officer Ronnie Medeiros reported that she told him that "she had a protective order placed on Muzzammil due to his violent behavior in the past."

The order didn't prohibit Muzzammil Hassan from living with his wife, but did order that he "restrain from assault, stalking, harassment, aggravated harassment, menacing, reckless endangerment, disorderly conduct, intimidation, threats or any criminal offense" against Aasiya Hassan, the couples' two younger children—Danyal and Rania—or Muzzammil's two older children from his first marriage—Sonia and Michael.

The protective order also stated that Muzzammil Hassan is "to refrain from corporal punishment" towards all four children.

In the Texas report, the officer said that Aasiya Hassan had told him that on the Friday before, which would have been June 29, 2007, the couple had argued over a GPS navigation system. "Aasiya stated that Muzzammil was going fishing with his family and she wanted to use the GPS tracker to go site seeing. When Muzzammil told her no, she made the comment that she should have known better than to even ask," the officer wrote in the report. He said Aasiya Hassan said her comment "upset" her husband and "he grabbed her arm and told her to apologize." The officer said that Aasiya Hassan showed him bruising on her upper left arm, and the officer told her that "in Texas anytime an assault from family violence is reported to us we are required to file a report."

What happened next reveals just how delicate a situation it can be trying to break the cycle of violence. The officer wrote, "Aasiya then asked if she could speak to her brother-in-law." While she was talking, the officer wrote, he started taking notes on the protective order, noting that when Aasiya Hassan noticed "she questioned me." The officer explained, he said, that he was just taking notes for his report. "Aasiya got very offended and stopped cooperating with my interview," he wrote.

"She fled the police station," said officer Wess Griffin, a spokesman for the Flower Mound police, with the officer following her into the parking lot, calling after her, "Wait," trying to persuade her to return to the station.

Four days later, on July 6, 2007, Aasiya Hassan returned to the Flower Mound police station. She filed a domestic violence complaint against her husband, and an officer took six photos of bruises to her left arm and leg. For "Dates of Incidents," Aasiya Hassan reported "August 06, December 06, March 07, June 07." The length of the relationship at the time: six years, nine months. She described her husband as 6'2," 295 pounds. In an indication that Aasiya Hassan may have been trying to protect her husband's reputation as an American-Muslim entrepreneur, the report said, she "refused" to divulge his employer information.

According to the report, she said that on June 30, 2007, Muzzammil Hassan "coerced her into a bedroom." The police spokesman in Flower Mound said the officer believed this was the same incident she had come to report earlier, though there is a discrepancy with her dates. In the bedroom, she said, he "pushed her down onto the bed, sat on her chest and pinned her arms and legs down." "This was done to `make' her listen to him," the report said. The officer noted that, in addition to the most recent protective order, Aasiya Hassan had had three other protective orders.

In an attempt to pursue the case, a Flower Mound police detective tried to contact Aasiya and Muzzammil Hassan six times over the month. On July 23, 2007, the report said, the detective visited the local address Aasiya Hassan had listed in her report, speaking to the home owner, Mahmood Khawaja Hassan, "who advised Ms. Hassan is married to his son and they have already gone back to their home in New York."

Unable to reach the couple, the Flower Mound detective suspended the case on July 31, 2007.

Back in Orchard Park, New York, Muzzammil Hassan sits in a holding cell. In Buffalo last week, a brother of Muzzammil Hassan draped an arm over teenager Michael in comfort, during the funeral ceremony for Aasiya Hassan. And, in a temporary new home, Aasiya Hassan's family has taken his children under their care, said community members. A particular salvation for Aasiya Hassan's distraught mother, they said: the rambunctious, bubbly ways of her young four-year-old granddaughter, Rania, who, a community member said, "doesn't seem to completely realize what happened."

Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com

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Prelude to Murder
by Asra Q. Nomani
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-02-23/deadly-family-secrets/

In a Daily Beast exclusive, Asra Q. Nomani reports that the Muslim man accused of beheading his wife had a long history of mental illness and violent rages—and talks to family and friends about their brutal marriage.

In the 1990s, a rising 30-something Pakistani-American sat in the living room of a ranch house in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, where one of the aunties of the American-Muslim community lived, and he bellowed in rage about his 20-something Pakistani wife, Sadia: "She doesn't look good. She doesn't work. She is a good for nothing."

The auntie, Azra Gillani, now 63, studied the man. She, like others in the Rochester Muslim community, had watched the husband's first marriage to a white American convert, Janice, disintegrate amid allegations of abuse. She turned to the young bride, who sat beside her, stoic and dignified, and asked for her side of the story. "He abuses me," the wife said, telling of how her husband locked her in a room in their home, pulled the plug on their telephone so she couldn't use it, lashed out at her in verbal tirades, refused her spending money, shoved her out of his car, stranding her on the highway, and, once, threw a glass at her, but missed. The bride's family sought out explanations for his turnaround from a cheerful groom to an abusive husband, and his mother told them that, alas, he wasn't taking psychiatric medicines prescribed for mood swings, said members of the community involved in the conversations. Within the year, the wife left the marriage, according to family members.
The family of Hassan's second wife sacrificed two goats in thanks that their daughter had escaped her marriage alive.

A third marriage and just over a decade later, that man, Muzzammil Hassan, 44 years old, stands accused of the shocking murder of his next wife, Aasiya Zubair Hassan—a woman who was buried, according to people who saw her in repose, with gashes on her face and body and her head delicately poised over her body, because of the brutal way in which she was murdered and then decapitated in the town of Orchard Park, just west of Rochester.

Last week, Orchard Park police said Hassan arrived at the station and told them that they could find the body of his wife, 37, at the offices of the Bridges Muslim TV network that he had founded. Hassan has been charged with second-degree murder, and is in jail. No bail has been set. On Wednesday, after his first official proceeding since he was arrested, his attorney, James Harrington, waived the presentation of evidence, setting the stage for a grand-jury proceeding soon. The attorney told reporters there, "If and when he's indicted, he'll plead not guilty," adding, "It's too early to know what approach we'll take, but we're exploring everything."

In death, as details emerge of the troubled life she led with her husband, Aasiya Hassan has become a symbol for critics of Islamic law, or sharia, and spurring denunciation of so-called honor-killings. On February 6, six days before her murder, Aasiya Hassan had filed for divorce. Court filings by Aasiya's estate since then allege a long history of domestic violence in the marriage, a history that many in the community say they were aware of but did nothing to help stop.

And in the Pakistani-American community, Muzzammil Hassan—who built a media empire in the American-Muslim community, crisscrossing the globe, courting investors and cable companies, while being celebrated by organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C.,-based civil-rights advocacy group—has gone from from "hero to zero."

"Our community failed," says Afshan Qureshi, the president of Saathi, an advocacy group in Rochester for domestic-violence victims and a leader in the local Muslim community, who helped Hassan's second wife. "We punished the victims. People said the first marriage failed because the girl was American, the second marriage failed because the girl wasn't patient enough and then, look, the third wife is happy. Everything is OK. The community is an accomplice in the story of Muzzammil Hassan."

This story is made more complex by the secrecy with which traditional communities, such as the Muslim one, often deal with serious societal issues such as domestic violence, mental illness, and women's rights. In the days since the murder, some in the closely guarded local Muslim community are quietly talking about Hassan's long battle with mental illness—at one time, they say, diagnosed as bipolar disorder, according to people who have spoken to Hassan's family about his medical treatment. They don't want to talk openly for fear Hassan will use the illness as a legal defense, but people familiar with his second and third marriage said that his mother would lament that he would act erratically and violently when he wasn't taking his psychiatric medicines. Hassan's family didn't return calls seeking comment.

Like many immigrants, Hassan lived with a dissonance. According to people in the community, Hassan referred to himself by different names, including "Steve Hassan," "Mo Hassan" and "Mo Steven Hassan." Born on Nov. 6, 1964, according to US records, Hassan was part of a wave of immigrants that came to America from South Asia, settling in college towns.

Hassan arrived in 1979, taking root in Rochester, graduating with a bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester in 1985. During his undergraduate years, Hassan took a pause from his studies to call an "uncle" in the emerging American-Muslim community, Salahuddin Malik. He was a State University of New York history professor and is now chairman of the council of trustees at the Islamic Center of Rochester. The professor said Hassan told him that the two of them should lobby their local US congressman on issues related to Islam and Pakistan. "We need to meet him," Hassan said, and soon enough they did.

Hassan was becoming a fixture on the local Muslim scene. The community saw him bring his first wife, Janice, to the mosque and then their son and daughter to Sunday school. His wife used the Muslim name "Amina." They seemed to be a happy couple, say community members, but then word of domestic violence started circulating; mediation at the mosque failed and the couple divorced. Qureshi, the domestic-violence advocate, says she remembers Hassan picking up his children from mosque Sunday school, re-establishing his relationships with the "uncles" in the community post-divorce. "He made a big show of things," she says. (On her answering machine at home, Hassan's first wife left a "no comment" message for media inquiries.)

In 1996, Hassan graduated from the Simon Graduate School of Business at the University of Rochester with an MBA. He married his second wife in Pakistan in a marriage arranged by a relative of the bride in Rochester. A person familiar with the marriage said the relatives were impressed with his calm persona and good manners at the mosque, spotting him during prayers and Sunday school with his children. The marriage soon deteriorated with Hassan often times angry and paranoid, say family members of the second wife The mosque imam mediated to no avail, says the domestic-violence advocate Qureshi, who made arrangements for the wife to get legal immigration status in the US even as a divorcee and she left the marriage.

Soon after, word spread in the community that Hassan had remarried, this time to a bright young architect from Karachi, Aasiya Zubair. They settled in Orchard Park, on the outskirts of Buffalo, not far from the Rochester community that knew Hassan's troubled history well. It's a mostly middle-class, predominately white community of about 30,000 residents.

The daughter of an engineer, Aasiya Hassan was personable, says Hassan Shibly, a University of Buffalo law-school student and local Muslim-American who started working for the couple as a high-school teen. "Aasiya was a very sweet lady," says Shibly. Operating a 7-Eleven franchise, Aasiya Hassan brought Slurpees, Pringles and lollipops to employees working in the basement of the Hassan home on a business the couple began post-9/11: creating a new Muslim-American TV channel called Bridges Network Inc. Aasiya Hassan juggled her roles as an entrepreneur and a mother to the couple's two children, Danyal, now six, and Rania, now four. (The estate of Aasiya Hassan won an order this past Friday by a Buffalo judge to temporarily freeze $2.5 million worth of assets and property held by Hassan and his TV business.)

All the while, according to court documents filed by an attorney for her estate claim, she was living in a domestic hell: "the subject of numerous complaints to various police agencies for violence" toward Aasiya Hassan and [his] children from a prior marriage.

Many in the community now lament not intervening in the problems that Orchard Park police reports chronicle as dating back six years. Shibly, the law student, says he landed at the Bridges TV channel through an "uncle" in the Buffalo Muslim community, Faizan Haq, a University of Buffalo professor, an early investor in Bridges TV, and a friend of Malik, the Rochester professor who Hassan had taken to a meeting with a congressman. In Rochester, Malik said he believed in Hassan's vision and didn't think history of domestic violence should preclude him from making it happen. On top of that, Malik says, "You don't want to get involved in personal matters."

While preserving privacy, Malik's wife, Sarwat Malik, a physician who also knew about Muzzammil Hassan's history of domestic violence, says that this dynamic comes with a high socio-psychological cost:

"Everyone is suffering in silos. This should change. Women are battered in all cultures, and the common factor is the social sanction of violence against women. As a community, we must bear a collective responsibility of keeping everyone safe. It cannot be done by a few organizations. It must be done by all, working together. We need to make it a whole community affair. Everyone must speak out that violence will not be tolerated."

On Nov. 30, 2004, just after Muzzammil Hassan's 40th birthday, Bridges TV aired for the first time. Hassan told reporters at the time that the company received financing from more than 50 private investors and Ropart Asset Management, a private-equity fund. In addition, he told the media, more than 10,000 American Muslims provided $10 a month in the year before to show a demand for the station. At the grand opening: many of the uncles who supported the Bridges TV vision, including Haq and Malik.

While many there knew of the domestic-violence problems, the say they felt hamstrung about getting involved, thinking, too, that Hassan's new wife was happy in her marriage. This past weekend, Haq, the Buffalo Muslim leader, told the Buffalo News, "I think of Aasiya as a martyr," later adding, "If only Aasiya would have made some noise."

In the days after the murder, Shahed Amanullah, the editor of a popular Muslim e-zine, altmuslim.com, and other young American Muslims, inclusding Wajahat Ali, a playwright and lawyer from Fremont, California, and Zeba Iqbal, a manager at Ernst &Young in New York, started a Facebook campaign to galvanize imams to devote their Friday sermons to combating domestic violence in the community. Ali says: "This marks a turning point where ordinary Muslims are acting."

Zerqa Abid, a first cousin of Hassan's second wife, penned an essay on her blog, asking "Did we ever bother to know Muzzammil?" And Mohamed Hagmagid Ali, a vice president of the national organization, ISNA, and a mosque leader in Sterling, Virginia, wrote a widely circulated treatise against the complicity of community members in domestic violence: "A man's position in the community should not affect the imam's decision to help a woman in need. Many disasters that take place in our community could have been prevented if those being abused were heard."

Back in Buffalo, the Muslim community had a meeting on domestic violence Saturday, just days after they had buried Aasiya Hassan. Most of the uncles and aunties of the community were there, as was Qureshi, the Muslim domestic-violence advocate from Rochester who had helped Hassan's second wife. Over the weekend, she reflected, "Aasiya was a brave woman who stood up against violence. She didn't need to be alone."

Meanwhile from Pakistan, Qureshi heard a story, confirmed by family members: The family of Hassan's second wife had sacrificed two goats in thanks that their daughter had escaped her marriage alive.
Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com.

===

Beheading Case Goes to Court
by Asra Q. Nomani
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-02-20/new-twist-in-beheading-case/

In a Daily Beast exclusive, Asra Q. Nomani reports that lawyers for the Muslim woman allegedly murdered in a brutal attack by her husband are trying to prevent him from hiding assets from their two surviving children. View the court documents here.

The estate of Aasiya Hassan, the Muslim mother of two who was allegedly murdered and beheaded last week at the hands of her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, is seeking to prevent her husband from hiding his assets from their children.

Today, a Buffalo, N.Y., judge met the request, and agreed to temporarily freeze $2.5 million worth of assets and property held by Hassan and Bridges Network Inc., the American-Muslim TV channel the couple operated.

Aasiya Hassan's estate is trying to preserve the couple's assets for their two surviving children: their 6-year-old son Danyal, and their 4-year-old daughter, Rania. In a statement to the court yesterday, an attorney at HoganWillig, an Amherst, N.Y., law firm retained by Aasiya Hassan before her death to represent her in a divorce filing against her husband, claimed there is reason to believe that Muzzammil Hassan could try to prevent the children from collecting funds. The filings also allege a long history of violence between Hassan and his wife.

Last week, Orchard Park, N.Y., police said Muzzammil Hassan, 44, had arrived at the station and told them that they could find the body of his murdered wife, 37, at Bridges offices. Hassan has been charged with second degree murder, and is currently in jail. No bail has been set.

The murder has sent shock waves through the American Muslim community. The Hassans were prominent entrepreneurs who started their television network in an effort to improve the image of Islam after September 11, 2001. Community activists pressed preachers to dedicate their Friday sermons today to the issue of domestic violence.

In his statement, the estate's attorney alleges that Muzzammil Hassan had a lengthy history of domestic violence and was "the subject of numerous complaints to various police agencies for violence" toward Aasiya Hassan and his children from a prior marriage.

On February 6, six days before her murder, Aasiya Hassan had filed for divorce. The recent filings refer to a previous effort by Aasiya Hassan to freeze her husband's assets.

A formal lawsuit with more specific claims is likely to follow. The filing say the estate will "file a summons and complaint pursuing causes of action for assault, battery, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, pain, suffering, and wrongful death," as well as other issues.

The case is filed as Acea Mosey, administrator for the estate of Aasiya Hassan, v. Hassan and Bridges Network. Mosey had retained HoganWillig, the filing said, to pursue claims on behalf of the estate.

Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com

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