An American Muslim girl said that the police forced her to remove her headscarf during her participation a few days ago in the "Life of the Blacks important" protests, stressing that her constitutional rights had been violated, and called for an investigation of the officers involved.
Alaa Al-Masri, 18, said she was arrested in Miami, Florida, on June 10, when skirmishes occurred between protesters and the police.
She added that she was taken handcuffed to a correction and rehabilitation center in Dade County, Miami, where she was forced to remove her headscarf to take a picture of the criminal custody.
The girl was left without her headscarf for seven hours, and her pictures were made available to countless media outlets, some of whom posted these pictures on the Internet.
Ala demanded - in an online petition that obtained more than 130,000 signatures - to drop all charges against her, remove that image, and open an investigation into the incident.
"We want the police officers who committed this injustice to be investigated and held responsible for what happened," said the citizenship petition.
The petition condemned the police treatment of the young Muslim woman, as these officers "consciously ignored her right to be a Muslim woman who adhered to the teachings of Islam, and published a picture of her that she did not think would be available to the general public one day."
The Reform and Rehabilitation Center defended the action taken, saying that its policy requires the headscarf to be removed during arrest, and that the cap be returned to its owner "as soon as the search for contraband is completed and a photo of criminal preservation is taken."
But Omar Saleh, a lawyer at the Council of American-Islamic Relations CAIR in Florida, said that any measure that requires someone to take off a headscarf that he wears for religious reasons in order to take a picture of him violates many laws that protect religious freedoms, adding that Alaa has an Egyptian, If it deems it justified to file a civil lawsuit against the management of this center.
In a statement to Middle East Eye, the lawyer said that there are small-scale security exceptions that would allow the person's headscarf to be removed separately in order to search, but what happened to the Egyptian appeared to exceed the permitted procedures.
He added that there is a difference between removing the veil during the detention process, or while taking a picture of a criminal reservation for security reasons and then returning the veil to its owner and preventing it - as happened to his client - from wearing her veil for hours during detention, because this exceeds the permissible range significantly, he said.
The Egyptian police accused that they revolted in the face of their officers when they tried to remove them with the number of demonstrators from the memorials of Christopher Columbus and Juan Ponce de Leon, and that they punched a policeman on his shoulder resisting the order to vacate the place, which made the officers arrest her on charges of "resisting the police with violence and misconduct". .