Vermont man found guilty of shooting three Palestinian students in 2023

The man charged with shooting three young Palestinian college students in 2023 in the US state of Vermont was found guilty of three counts of attempted second-degree murder on Monday.

The victims, Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdel Hamid and Tahseen Ahmed, were on their way to a family dinner when they were shot by 51-year-old Jason Eaton. They were speaking in Arabic, and two of them were wearing keffiyehs.

Lawyers for Eaton had argued that he was suffering from delusions during the shootings, saying that he believed voices, which he thought were from CIA agents, told him to carry out the attack to protect a Jewish family in his neighbourhood.

The attack left Awartani, who was a student at Brown University at the time, paralysed from the chest down.

“The verdict cannot undo what happened or erase the trauma our families still carry, but it affirms something fundamental: Jason Eaton is responsible for what he did,” Awartani’s mother, Elizabeth Price, told reporters after the decision.

The families, however, criticised the decision not to categorise the attack as a hate crime. In Vermont, recent hate crime charges have been filed only when a defendant explicitly uttered a slur during the crime.

“This was a hate crime. We have said so from the beginning. The law never made him answer for it. But we know what he did," the families said in a statement after the verdict.

The three victims were wearing their keffiyehs in the courtroom, while the judge ordered other observers to remove their keffiyehs due to “concern about how that would impact the jury", according to the New York Times.