The man charged with a hate crime in connection to a possible "knockout" attack on a Jewish man says the cops have got the wrong guy—and that he has a Jewish girlfriend.
Amrit Marajh, 28, was arrested along with three other suspects on Friday for the alleged attack on 24-year-old Shmuel Perl, who was walking home from work early Friday morning in Borough Park. Perl said he was surrounded by a group of attackers and punched in the face, "As I'm walking on the sidewalk, the group surrounded me and one of them with a closed fist hit in me the face." Perl, who managed to escape, told PIX 11, "They called after me, 'Come back I can do this. I can knock you out.'"
The other three suspects were released, but yesterday Marajh was charged with aggravated harassment in the second degree as a hate crime, third-degree assault, and third-degree assault as a hate crime for the alleged attack. An attorney for Marajh, James Kirshner, argued in court yesterday that Marajh had nothing to do with the "knockout" game, and that his client was not anti-Semitic. "My girlfriend’s Jewish," Marajh said. "I never hit the guy. They try to say it’s a hate crime. Why is it that I was the one arrested?"
Marajh was released yesterday on $750 bail; meanwhile, officials continue to speculate as to whether the recent rash of attacks on Jews in Brooklyn are connected to the "knockout" assaults, a "game" in which individuals try to knock random victims out in one punch. Rev. Al Sharpton condemned the attacks yesterday. "This kind of insane thuggery—there is nothing cute about that," he said at his weekly National Action Network meeting in Harlem yesterday. "There is no game play about knocking somebody out, and it is not a game. It is an assault and is bias, and it is wrong."
