Police find Gilbert teen innocent in bomb scare

Ban Abdulghafoor did not expect to hear the voice of a Gilbert police officer on the line when she answered the phone last Thursday.

It was the final day of school at Mesquite Junior High School, and her 13-year-old son, Mustafa Abdul Razzaq, decided to stay home because it was a halfday. The call woke him from his late-morning slumber.

While Mustafa was asleep, Gilbert police were looking for him at school. This was going on as his fellow students were being evacuated at the school after a parent reported what appeared to be two bomb threats written in her son’s yearbook.

A boy named David signed one of the threats, implying that he might try to bomb the courtyard. The other threat was signed with Mustafa’s name.

Mustafa, his mother and police discussed the incident in interviews with the Tribune.

The teen and his family call it a religious bias incident that was one of many over the years that have targeted the boy because he is a Muslim. Police say it was just a prank that had unfortunate consequences.

The young Iraqi American recalls telling police, through tears, that another boy in his grade wrote the comment about him. He knew this because another student told him about it the week before. He had even confronted the boy about the yearbook.

At the time, he says, the boy laughed and walked away.

After speaking with Mustafa and his mother, police arrested two of Mustafa’s schoolmates, 13- and 14-year-old boys, who quickly admitted to writing the comments. The threat turned out to be a hoax, and the district filed several charges against the two boys. Police determined the two were friends and they wrote the bomb threats to be humorous.

Neither Mustafa nor his mother thought it was funny.

Since the deadly attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they say this is just one of many times that Mustafa’s classmates have labeled him a terrorist. He says kids have told him to “go hijack a plane and run into a building” verbally and on notes they’ve left on his desk.

Sometimes he’d retaliate and get suspended. Sometimes, he’d ignore them.

But because the whole school was evacuated last week, he’s afraid to return there. He says he’s been getting phone calls and text messages from kids asking if he is guilty even though he’s been cleared by police.

Mustafa is upset with the school.

“Some of the teachers in the junior high don’t care,” Mustafa says of the discriminatory teasing he’s endured. “They don’t want to get into this kind of stuff. That’s why I don’t like Mesquite Junior High School that much.”

Mohammed AbuHannoud, the civil rights director for the Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says his organization hears these types of complaints all the time.

“I think Mustafa is an example of what’s going on here after Sept. 11 with a lot of Muslim families,” AbuHannoud says. “I get so many calls, for example, from other parents and they complain, ‘My son is called Saddam, or a classmate called my son Hussein or Saddam Hussein.’ The schools do not do anything serious against that.”

Gilbert police spokesman Sgt. Andrew Duncan says the department is “sympathetic to the serious psychological effects of bias-motivated crimes,” but in this instance, police found the two students meant it as a joke.

Even so, the department took the hoax seriously and submitted juvenile referrals for each boy on charges of interfering with an educational institution, threatening and intimidating, and threatening to damage the school.

On Wednesday night, no one answered the phone at the home of the boy who wrote about Mustafa in the yearbook.

Dianne Bowers, a spokeswoman for the Gilbert Unified School District, says Mustafa’s mother had not contacted the school to report race- or religion-related bias incidents.

However, Bowers tried to address these concerns Wednesday by arranging an appointment for Abdulghafoor to meet with the school’s diversity officer. She also said the school strives to promote tolerance through its Character Counts program, which encourages trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness and citizenship.

Abdulghafoor says she has been in touch with school officials and is disappointed with the lack of response.

She said the first religious bias incident occurred in 2001. Mustafa was in second grade, and one day, her husband got a call from FBI agents. They told him the school had called the bureau after a teacher overheard Mustafa call himself Osama bin Laden. Later, his mother said he told them that kids at school had been calling him by the terrorist’s name.

The FBI could not immediately verify the 2001 incident, but the bureau’s Arizona spokeswoman, Deborah Mc-Carley, says the family’s story sounds plausible. After Sept. 11, any complaints referring to terrorism had to be assessed and taken seriously.

Another incident occurred last year, Mustafa says. He was made fun of when he came to school dressed in traditional Saudi Arabian garb for a class assignment — each student was to come to school representing a different country.

“They tell him again, ‘You are Osama bin Laden,” his mother remembered. “You are a terrorist. Your mom is a terrorist. Your dad is a terrorist. You have to go back to your country.”

His mother learned of the incident after a teacher called the family’s home to report it.

Now, the American-Islamic council says it wants to get involved over the bomb threat case. AbuHannoud wants to offer sensitivity training at the school for the teachers, and he also plans to see whether the Gilbert Police Department would be willing to reopen the case.

“For the police to determine that was some kind of humor, I believe that was not professional,” he says. “If you look at the background of Mustafa at the school where he was subjected to many racial statements like: You are Bin Laden. You are a terrorist. Go back to your country.

“You would assume in that context this is not a joke. It’s a series of racial actions,” Abu-Hannoud says.

As for Mustafa, he says this latest incident has made him seriously contemplate going to a different school next year. He blames his classmate who wrote the threat.

“He ruined everything,” he says. “He ruined all my friends. I had a lot of friends, and they think I’m the one who did it.”