Police !. Please hurry to TIVON !...

Chi-town Muslim arrested for Ramadan lamb slaughter – in garage

By creeping

Sharia keeps on creeping, creeping, into the U.S. From the Sun-Times.

BY MARK J. KONKOL Staff Reporter

A liquor store clerk arrested Sunday after he slaughtered a lamb in his North Park garage says he got pinched because police did not understand he had a good reason for having an SUV packed with livestock.

Abdulsalam Alawi, 38, was charged with four counts of possession of animals for slaughter, a city ordinance violation. Police responding to a neighbor’s complaint found Alawi in his garage in the 3200 block of West Ardmore with four lambs. One of them was already dead.

Alawi says he can explain.

He was on his way home from a Canton, Wis., farm where he bought four live lambs for $400. He tied their hooves, packed them in his Suzuki SUV and was headed to a Chicago butcher shop where the animals would be slaughtered in accordance with Islamic law.

Alawi, a Muslim originally from Yemen, planned to give lamb meat as gifts to friends during Ramadan — the Islamic holiday when believers fast and pray from sunrise to sundown every day for a month.

Before he could make it to the slaughterhouse, one of the lambs appeared to be near death, Alawi said. So he stopped at his apartment to give the beast some water to keep it alive until it could be properly butchered. A lamb cannot be dead before being butchered according to Islamic law, or Halal.

“I had to kill it before it died. If it dies you can’t eat it. I’d have to just throw it away,” Alawi said.

That’s at least $100 worth of meat Alawi didn’t want to lose. So he took out a sharp knife, slit the animal’s throat and got ready to take the animals to the butcher shop.

That’s when dozens of police cars showed up. “It was crazy,” he said. “Like I killed someone.”