'Muslim' Woman Thrown from Moving Train in Australia

A woman described by Australian media as "Muslim" has been beaten and thrown from a moving train in Melbourne.

On Monday police said the victim was grabbed by the neck and rammed into a wall of the carriage before being shoved off the train by a woman of Caucasian appearance on Thursday night, according to the ABC.

The police have issued scant details about the identity of the victim, but local media outlet 7 News has described her as a “Muslim woman,” and that the culprit made “racist remarks” before the attack.

Just days earlier Victorian Chief Commissioner Ken Lay called on the public to report cases of suspected racial vilification.

Lay claimed the police have no data indicating “prejudice related crime or racial vilification” is on the rise, “but from what I've been told there are a number of issues happening out there in the community that are not being reported to the police,” Lay stated, according to The Age.

“Muslim women are being addressed in the street and insulted about their garb, there are some threats being made to police, these are issues we need to see and understand,” he said.

Racism in Australia is on the rise, according to the results of the latest Mapping Social Cohesion survey. Conducted by the Scanlon Foundation, the survey found 19 percent of Australians faced some form of racial or religious discrimination in 2013 – the highest level since the annual survey began in 2007.

In 2011, the largest survey on racism in Australia's history found roughly half the Australian population have anti-Muslim views.

The survey was conducted by a group of Australian universities over a 12 year period. It also found one in three Australians discriminate against Indigenous peoples, while one in four are anti-Semites.

See also: Muslims Face New Wave of Islamophobia Across Western World