Source: ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL
By Katy Barnitz / Journal Staff Writer
Khawla Abdel-Haq said she felt like she’d been undressed when Gill Parker Payne pulled the hijab off her head during a flight to Albuquerque in December,
“He violated me, not just took off my scarf,” she said in an interview after the hearing. “I felt like he took off my shirt, my pants in front of everybody.”
In May, Payne, who lives in North Carolina but travels frequently for his sales job, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of obstructing a person’s free exercise of religious beliefs.
Payne, 37, apologized during Tuesday’s hearing and said he has taken online courses to familiarize himself with other religions and recently toured a mosque in hopes of learning more about Islam.
“I’m embarrassed,” he said. “I’m 100 percent embarrassed.”
Payne said he was drunk on the flight and “doesn’t fully remember everything” that happened.
But Abdel-Haq remembers.
“I’m not gonna forget it,” she said. “It’s going to be with me every minute of every day of my life.”
She was sitting in an aisle seat on the Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago to Albuquerque after a trip to Ohio to help her daughter shop for a wedding dress when Payne approached her about 30 minutes before the flight landed, she said.
“He was standing beside me and I looked up to him and he looked down at me,” she said. “I was minding my own business. He went and he grabbed my scarf, my hijab, and he told me, ‘Take it off. Take that shit off. This is America.’ ”
Categories: America, Hijab, The Muslim Times, USA, Women