WASHINGTON: Tho­usands gathered in a Washington suburb on Wednesday afternoon to pay their final respects to a 17-year-old Muslim girl who was killed in Virginia earlier this week.

The daylong funeral began with prayers at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society mosque in Sterling, Virginia, where Nabra Hassanen and friends were headed when attacked.

The mourners included a large number of non-Muslim sympathisers and friends as well.

A vigil in Dupont Circle in the District on Tuesday night also drew hundreds and hundreds more attended a vigil in Reston, another Washington suburb, on Wednesday night.

Nabra and a group of other teenagers were walking and biking along a road after a Ramazan event at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, ADAMS, Centre, a large mosque in Sterling, when they got into a dispute with the suspect, Darwin Martinez Torres.

Police said that moments after the altercation, he attacked the group with a baseball bat, beating Nabra to death. He then shoved her body in his car and threw it in a pond in the nearby Loudoun County. Vigils and prayers were also held in other US cities as the brutal assault alarmed the Muslim community and reverberated nationally with calls for a hate-crime investigation. Police are investigating it as a road rage crime.

Published in Dawn, June 23rd, 2017