Harassment preceded attack on T

By Francie Latour, Globe Staff

Three months after a Moroccan girl was attacked on an MBTA train, allegedly by classmates who thought she was gay, the state Attorney General's office yesterday said the 16-year-old was one of three Moroccan teens at Boston High School subjected to repeated harassment months before the incident on the T.

A fourth Moroccan girl ''was so terrified'' by the harassment - triggered when the girls followed a tradition of hand-holding customary in their homeland - that she returned to Morocco just six months after she had come to the United States to study.

''These young women came to this country for an education and instead were allegedly violently and repeatedly attacked because they were considered different,'' said Attorney General Thomas Reilly, whose office filed a civil complaint against three teenage girls arrested after the January MBTA attack.

But the civil complaint, which requests an injunction that would punish the three suspects with jail time if they harass people in the future, comes as a lawyer for one of the suspects says new evidence has surfaced in favor of his client.

And it comes as Boston school officials said the most significant example of prior harassment cited by the attorney general did not involve any of the girls arrested in the T attack, and was not triggered by antigay or anti-ethnic bias.

Steve Weymouth, an attorney for one of two 15-year-old girls charged in the attack, said last night that he was shocked at the charges leveled by the Attorney General's Office, and by the attempt to seek a civil rights injunction against his client.

Weymouth said two youth workers from City Year who witnessed part of the T incident and who broke up the fight have made statements to authorities that his client was not involved in the fight.

Weymouth's client, along with another juvenile and 17-year-old Nykesha Gant of Dorchester, were arrested in the January attack on an Orange Line train.

Prosecutors have charged the girls with four felony counts, including attempted rape, indecent assault of a child, assault with a dangerous weapon, and civil rights violations in a case that police and activists decried as an antigay and anti-ethnic hate crime. All three were expelled in February.

In a protracted incident that began on the train at the New England Medical Center stop and continued on a subway platform at State Street, prosecutors say Gant and the other suspects fondled the girl and tried to tear off her pants, at one point holding her arms apart and trying to molest her at knifepoint.

The girl managed to break free when a T patron intervened, authorities said.

Assistant Attorney General Suzanne Glick-Gilfix said yesterday her office uncovered a broader pattern of abuse in the course of investigating the alleged attack on the T.

Glick-Gilfix said that beginning in November 1999, a Moroccan girl was harassed while she worked at her computer at Boston High School and two Moroccan sisters were later assaulted in a school bathroom, leaving one of them with a bloody nose and broken glasses after she was thrown to the floor.

A few days later, she said, the other sister was attacked at the Arlington T stop on the Green Line.

Tracey Lynch, a Boston public schools spokeswoman, said school officials learned about the incident on the Arlington T stop after the January assault on the Orange Line.

But she said neither the incident in the girls' bathroom nor the alleged assault at the computer involved any of the girls arrested for the T attack and targeted in the attorney general's complaint.

Associated Press, April 24, 2000

Three girls accused of harassing Moroccan students face civil complaint

BOSTON (AP) - The state attorney general's office has filed a civil rights complaint against two female high school students who allegedly groped and ripped a Moroccan classmate's clothing because they thought she was gay.

The complaint, filed under the state's Civil Rights Act, accuses the two girls and another classmate of threats, intimidation and physical attacks on three Moroccan teen-age girls in the two months before the alleged attack on a subway train in January.

The alleged victims were the targets of anti-gay insults after they were seen holding hands, the attorney general's office said. Prosecutors said that they had moved to the United States six months ago from Morocco, where schoolgirls often hold hands.

One girl was kicked and beaten, the complaint alleges, suffering cuts and a bloody nose. One of the alleged victims was so scared that she returned to Morocco, the attorney general's office said.

Three girls were charged criminally in the alleged subway attack. At the time of the attack, police said they were looking for other suspects, and the attorney general's office would not identify the three girls included in the civil complaint and did not say if they are the same girls that were charged criminally.

A hearing on a preliminary injunction for the civil charges is scheduled for May 2. If the injunction is granted, it would serve as a kind of restraining order, keeping the alleged assailants away from the victims and providing for future punishment if the terms are violated, said Assistant Attorney General Suzanne Glick Gilfix.

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