Who Is Yasmin Seweid? Muslim Teen Arrested For Falsely Reporting Trump-Related Hate Crime On New York City Subway

UPDATE: 11:03 a.m. EST – The sister of a Muslim woman who lied about being attacked in a New York City subway station over her religion posted a response about her sister's arrest and subsequent fallout on Facebook. Sara Seweid said she didn't know why her sister, Yasmin, had lied. The police should not have been involved, she said before decrying both police behavior and media coverage.

"I had more than one cop tell me that they've looked through all our social media (me, my entire family, and my fiance) and it doesn't look good that we've been vocal about certain issues they perceive to be anti- trump, anti white, and even anti men. How is this an appropriate comment by an office investigating a possible hate crime?" she wrote. "That Muslims can't seek help from the state if they are critical of it in any capacity?"

She went on to say that people had spread damaging rumors about her sister following the media coverage.

"I'm not excusing what she did. I was horrified yesterday and I'm still trying to grapple with the facts. Things snowballed out of our control because of the media because by the next morning the news had started publishing stories. Reporters made things so much worse for my family."

Seweid said the NYPD had leaked private information that her sister had disclosed to them in confidence and expressed concern about the "mental state of young Muslim women who feel that they have to lie so intensely to survive."

She continued: "The NYPD doesn't care about us or our safety. Never did. This won't make things for Muslims any worse than they have been. Why do you only care about violence against muslim women if its perpetuated by the state. You don't think calling for an 18 year old girl to be jailed for lying to be violent and abhorrent?"

She ended the post with a call for privacy.

"My sister may have lied but she has dealt with an insurmountable amount of violence and trauma both publicly and privately these past two weeks. I ask you to kindly stop adding to it and making things worse."

Original story:

An 18-year-old Muslim college student who filed a police report Dec. 1 telling authorities she had been harassed and assaulted by three white men in an anti-Muslim hate crime on a New York City train was arrested Thursday when she admitted the whole ordeal was a lie. Yasmin Seweid was booked Wednesday after she came clean about the incident, which police told the NY Daily News she'd made up to avoid punishment for a missed curfew.

“I heard them talk, but I had my headphones in, I wasn't really listening, I had a long day. And they came closer and I distinctly heard them saying 'Donald Trump.' They were surrounding me from behind and they were like, ‘Oh look, it’s an f---ing terrorist,’” she originally told authorities. “I didn’t answer. They pulled my strap of the bag and it ripped, and that’s when I turned around and I was really polite and I was like ‘Can you please leave me alone?’ And everyone was looking, no one said a thing, everyone just looked away.”

Seweid told police the three men told her to "go back to your country" and to "take that rag off your head."

She claimed the confrontation took place at about 10 p.m. EST as she was leaving an event at Baruch College, where she attends school.

At the time, Seweid placed partial responsibility on President-elect Donald Trump, who called for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. during his campaign and said he would think about implementing a database to register Muslims, for the incident.

“The president-elect just promotes this stuff and is very anti-Muslim, very Islamophobic, and he’s just condoning it,” she told CBS New York.

Seweid went missing a few days after reporting the incident to police but was found safe. Authorities did not release information about where she had been.

She admitted Wednesday that the incident never took place and that she had lied to avoid her strict parents finding out that she had been out late drinking with friends. She was charged Thursday with filing a false report and obstructing governmental administration in Manhattan Criminal Court.

Under New York state law, a hate crime is committed when a victim is targeted due to a perception or belief about their race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability or sexual orientation. New York City police saw 43 crimes targeting Jewish people, Muslims, gay people and other groups since the election, an uptick when compared to the 20 during the same period last year, according to Reuters.

In one such incident, a man reportedly tried to kill an off-duty police officer wearing a Muslim head scarf in Brooklyn Dec. 5.

“If anybody’s thinking in New York City about engaging in this type of behavior, just rest assured that you will be identified, you will be arrested, you will be charged accordingly,” Police Commissioner James O’Neill told reporters shortly afterward.

Falsely reporting a crime can be charged as a felony or a misdemeanor in the state and is punishable by up to a year in jail or seven years in state prison, depending on the situation.