Australia on Sunday said the attack on an Indian set afire here was not "targeted" or "racially-motivated", amid reports that two men attempting to leave this country were quizzed and had their passports seized over the killing of another youth from the community in New South Wales.
A cartoon in a Delhi newspaper, which allegedly depicted a Victoria policeman as a member of hate group Ku Klux Klan in the wake of attacks on Indians, has sparked an outrage in Australia with acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard condemning it as "deeply offensive".
Spokesman Sandy Logan said racism and violence issue against foreign students were not mainly to be blamed for the slide in visa applications. It was also due to stricter and tougher scrutiny of applications and the immigration department has been rejecting a higher number of applications from India, he said.
Contrary to the stand of the Australian government on the travel advisory issued by India, in the wake of unabated assaults and killing of its citizens in Australia, the Victorian police have supported it. The Victoria Police said they supported the general statements made in the advisory that Melbourne had seen an increase in violence, that this was often "accompanied by verbal abuse, fuelled by alcohol and drugs".The move came after a 21-year old Indian was stabbed here.
Australia on Tuesday asked India not to whip up 'hysteria' over the killing of a 21-year-old youth from the country, saying such incidents occur all over the world including Delhi and Mumbai, close on the heels of India warning that these attacks may have a bearing on ties. There was no evidence to suggest that the attack on Nitin Garg, a student who was fatally stabbed in the abdomen on Sunday while on his way to his part-time job in a restaurant, was racially-motivated.
Indian diplomats are expected to meet Australian officials in a bid to diffuse diplomatic tension between Canberra and New Delhi after the murder of 21-year-old Indian migrant in Melbourne.
Twenty-one-year-old Nitin Garg, an accounting graduate from Punjab, was stabbed to death on Sunday in the West Footscray area. He is the first to die in a slew of attacks on Indians in Australia.
The student, who was also a cabbie, was attacked and left to bleed on a Brunswick West street, police said. The victim parked his taxi outside his girlfriend's home on Collier Crescent in the wee hours today and rang her to bring his dinner outside when someone approached his vehicle, The Age reported.
According to The Australian newspaper, Satyam pledged to repay the funds given to the company by the Victorian government to lure it to Geelong after the scheme, which would have created 2000 jobs and contributed $175m to the state's economy, was canned in September as the IT firm struggled with the global financial crisis.
Interviews conducted with 900 secondary-school students across Australia found Anglo-Australian youths displayed consistent prejudice towards other cultural groups, particularly towards darker-skinned students from places such as Africa and India, the study revealed.
A Melbourne court has sentenced an Australian to over six years in jail for attacking an Indian taxi driver with a knife -- an incident that led to hundreds of Indian cabbies blocking the city streets last year. Justice Elizabeth Curtain sentenced Parrish Chales to six-and-a-half years in jail, saying the stabbing was 'random, unprovoked and frenzied' and the fact that the 45-year-old attacker had a hunting knife hidden in his pants showed a degree of 'premeditation'.
Sai Ratan Tiwari, who hails from Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, was on his way to a temple along with a friend on Sunday when two Australians accosted him. "They punched on my face and told me, 'In this place there is no home for you'," Tiwari said, adding that he refused to go to hospital and was instead treated by an on-site ambulance
Nearly 23 people were feared dead after a boat carrying about 40 suspected asylum seekers sank on Monday, hundreds of nautical miles off the Cocos Islands, west of Australia.
With incidents of attacks on Indians in Australia on the rise, many community members feel the root cause of such assaults is not race but the students' financial conditions that force them to be out at night for odd jobs to meet high cost of living in Australia.
In yet another attack on Indians in Australia, a Sikh was punched in his head by a group of Australians who also removed his turban while he was sleeping at a bus stop in Melbourne. Police said they are investigating the "unprovoked" bashing of the 22-year-old Indian youth who was punched in the head and had his turban removed as he slept at a bus stop on Sunday. However, the name and other details of the Indian man have not yet been made public.
Coming down heavily on racist attacks, an Australian court in Melbourne has sentenced the attacker of an Indian student, who went into a coma after being brutally beaten up, to over four years in jail. Judge Pamela Jenkins sentenced 21-year-old Zakarie Hussein to four-and-a-half years' jail term, with a minimum non-parole period of two years, observing that such racist attacks need to be condemned. Sukhraj Singh, 28, was attacked by Zakarie and a gang.
The five, four of whom are of Lebanese descent and one of Bangladeshi origin, now face possible life sentences after New South Wales State Supreme Court found them guilty of conspiring to commit acts in preparation for a terrorist attack.
After a brief lull in attacks on Indians in Australia, a student from the community was attacked with a 'plank of wood or a baseball bat' by two men, which left him with 20 stitches in his head. The 28-year-old student, whose name is not known immediately, was attacked by the men after he got down from a bus at Keilor Plains train station on Tuesday. He has been left with 20 stitches in his head after an 'unprovoked' attack in Melbourne's north-west.
In yet another attack on an Indian in Melbourne, a taxi driver from the community was injured when a drunk Australian star footballer allegedly assaulted him after an altercation. Essendon football player Michael Hurley was arrested for kicking and punching an Indian cabbie outside a fast-food outlet on Hoddle Street. The police arrested Hurley at the scene. The soccer player was later taken to Fitzroy police station and questioned about the incident.
Sukhdeep Singh, who was seriously injured in the latest racial attack against Indians in Australia, was not given proper treatment for three days after the assault, his brother-in-law alleged on Friday.
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