The Pune Police registered a case of non-cognisable offence against an American woman for allegedly attacking a doctor after asking her if she was Muslim, the Hindustan Times reported on Monday.

The American national was identified as 43-year-old Jaime Lynn Lewis, a resident of Montana in the United States. Lewis allegedly attacked some burqa-clad students on August 24, and assaulted the doctor on Sunday.

The doctor Qaseema Khan filed a complaint after the incident. Khan, who has a clinic in Pune’s Kondhwa area, said Lewis stopped her when she was on her way to a shopping mall and asked her about her religion. On finding out that she was Muslim, Lewis verbally and physically assaulted her, Khan said in the complaint.

Senior Police Inspector Chandrakant Bhosale of Lashkar police station said Lewis abused everyone, including the police as well as people from the embassy. “Our effort will be to get her deported,” Bhosale told the Hindustan Times. “The matter seems like it is a ‘hate crime’, but it is not. She seems to suffer from a mental condition.”

“We have checked her records and found that she is on prescription drugs and is taking treatment,” Assistant Police Inspector AP Suryavanshi said. “When we called the embassy while she was here, she started abusing us as well as the embassy officials.”

The American national was released after she was brought to the police station. She lives in a house owned by a Muslim man, and has been in India on a tourist visa since April 17. “She had been to Pune three years ago as well and had lived in the same house,” Suryavanshi said.

On August 24, Lewis had tried to attack college student Shafaq Shaikh and her friends while they were crossing a road. “She came running in our direction and started trying to hit us,” Shaikh said. “She tried to kick us as well. We had just stepped out from college for lunch. We were not in a mindset to handle this at all. Some people interfered, but were hesitant to touch her as she was a foreigner and then she went inside Clover Centre [a shopping mall in Pune].”

They had filed a complaint on August 26 and a non-cognisable offence was registered against an “unidentified woman”, who was later found to be Lewis.

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