Inna lillah... (pray for these three girls)

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Inna lillah... (pray for these three girls)
se7en
07/28/01 at 21:23:48

Divers Recover Body off NYC Beach

NEW YORK (AP) - The body of one of two sisters sucked into murky ocean depths by a powerful riptide was found Saturday by divers, police said.

Jubeda Ahmed, 16, was identified by dental records, said a coroner's spokeswoman.

Jubeda, her sister Shajeda Ahmed, 12, and their cousin Rahela Begum, 13, were wading in knee-deep water in an inlet off New York City's Rockaway Beach on Monday when they were pulled in by a riptide and thrust into deeper water. The beach's lifeguards were not scheduled to be on duty.

Rahela was pulled from the water after an hour. Shajeda hasn't been found.

The girls, from Paterson, N.J., were visiting their uncle's house in Elmont, N.Y., and accompanied him to the beach.

A mother and her 6-year-old daughter drowned last year in the spot where the girls disappeared.


Rockaway Drown Victim Buried

Row after row of white-shirted men stood on a Paterson, N.J., street last night and prayed for one of three promising girls who were swept away and drowned off Far Rockaway.
   
The crowd of 600 mourners, facing east toward Islam's holy city of Mecca, held their hands to their heads and chanted in front of a small coffin holding the body of 13-year-old Rahela Begum.

The girl died Monday along with her cousins Jubeda Ahmed, 16, and Shahzeda Ahmed, 12, as they splashed in the treacherous waters during a family outing. The bodies of Jubeda and Shahzeda had not been found last night.

"Losing one person is a tragic loss," said Akkas Ali, 36, the dead girls' uncle. "Losing three, it's impossible. It's very hard."

Under a sweltering sun, the men picked up the coffin in front of the Jalamabad Mosque on Van Houten St. and placed it in a hearse for the drive to a cemetery in Totowa, N.J.

There, women joined the other mourners to watch the burial. Islamic law requires that the dead be buried as soon as possible.

"They will get everything from our Lord," Imam Moulana Jamal Uddin said.

The Coast Guard and police searched Rockaway Inlet for hours yesterday but failed to find the bodies of the two girls. They planned to resume the search early today.

After offering condolences to the family yesterday, Mayor Giuliani said parents should keep children away from water — especially when lifeguards are not on duty. "If we can learn from this terrible tragedy, at least this will be something positive," he said.

Four grief-stricken relatives journeyed to the beach yesterday to pray at the spot where the girls disappeared.

Staring out at the sparkling sea, they held their hands aloft and tossed pebbles into the water.

"America will miss its three bright and beautiful children," the girls' families wrote in a statement.

The wrenching wait to find the two girls' bodies only compounded the numbing grief of their father, Ansar Ahmed, who spent a near-sleepless night and awoke at 5 a.m. yesterday for morning prayers.

"Allah, if it's possible, give me my daughters back," cried Ahmed, 53. "If not, I'm still happy with the lives they had."

Daylight brought dozens of relatives and friends to the family's three-story home in Paterson, where Ansar Ahmed helped found a Bangladeshi community group a quarter-century ago.

Dressed in a pink-striped shirt, the missing girls' 8-year-old sister wandered in the backyard, crying.

"I used to play with them and sometimes fight with them, but they were always kind," the little girl said. "I guess they're looking down on us from heaven right now."

A few blocks away, Ruman Begum, 25, sat on the front porch of his home, sobbing over the death of Rahela, his sister.

"Why does it have to be our family?" he asked. "Such innocent kids."

"She was just beginning to live," said neighbor Raquel Fermin, 13.

The deaths also shattered friends and classmates at John F. Kennedy High School, where Shahzeda was attending a summer science program and her sister was a popular junior honors student.

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Re: Inna lillah... (pray for these three girls)
jannah
07/28/01 at 21:29:04
Cousins Drown in Rockaways Riptide

By TAMER EL-GHOBASHY and DAVE GOLDINER
Three girls were splashing happily in knee-deep water yesterday on a family fishing outing to the Rockaways.In a flash, they were gone.
 
The girls — honor students and cousins from Paterson, N.J., ranging from 12 to 16 years old — were swept out to sea and drowned by a treacherous riptide as their uncle and cousins watched helplessly from the shore.

"It happened so quickly," said cousin Veeshan Akbar, 12. "Two seconds, and they were way out."

Within minutes, a police officer had pulled the body of Rahela Begum, 13, out of the water at Beach 13th St., four blocks east of where she was swept away about 9:15 a.m.

Jubeda Ahmed, 16, and her sister, Shajeda Ahmed, 12, were missing and presumed dead.

The sisters' father, Ansar, fought back tears outside his home last night and said he and his wife are clinging to hope "that maybe our daughters are coming back."

"But if they have passed away," he said, "I know Allah has them."

The father said his wife was "grieving, crying so much" that she couldn't talk to anyone and that he was still stunned by what happened to his girls. "I can't even explain to you how I feel," he said sadly.

The youngsters' uncle, Mohammed Fahrul Islam, said was preparing fishing rods on the public beach in Far Rockaway at Beach 17th St. when the current, moving swiftly at 5 feet per second, started dragging the girls into the middle of East Rockaway Inlet.

He watched in horror as the children flailed their arms helplessly and struggled to stay afloat near a buoy about 100 feet offshore.

"I just turned my head for a second," Islam told heartbroken relatives. "By the time I got there, it was too late."

Parks Department lifeguards do not start to patrol the beach until 10 a.m.; a sign warns swimmers to stay out of the water when it is unguarded.

Eight police divers and several Coast Guard cutters searched the 77-degree waters of the inlet until dusk for the bodies of Rahela's two cousins. The search was to resume this morning at dawn.

"This a very sad and tragic situation," said Mayor Giuliani, who visited the scene. "The current here can be very, very dangerous. If you do not see a lifeguard, don't go into the water."

Yesterday was to be a family day at the beach for Islam and eight children from the extended family with roots in Bangladesh.

Islam, a head waiter at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan, picked up the girls and several other children at the Elmont, L.I., home of his brother, Asmat Ali.

"They were giggling, saying, 'We're going to the beach,'" said Ali, 44, who works at Windows on the World. "I said, 'Great.'"

But Islam apparently didn't know the girls couldn't swim.

His son, Rizwan, 11, was playing with the girls when they were snatched by the current, which experts said was at its swiftest because high tide was minutes away.

As the rapid drift dragged his cousins away, Rizwan scrambled out of the fast-moving water and screamed for help.

"I thought I would never get out," Rizwan said.

Within seconds, several fishermen were screaming desperately for anyone who could help. But no one among the two dozen people on shore could swim.

Coast Guard officials and neighbors called the inlet one of the most treacherous spots in the Rockaways because the calm waters mask a fast-moving current. A young girl and her mother drowned in June after they were swept away in almost the exact spot as yesterday's incident.

"There's nothing to let you know how fast the current is," said Marc Sennick, a Coast Guard spokesman. With Alice McQuillan, Derek Rose and Nicole Bode

Re: Inna lillah... (pray for these three girls)
taueeya
07/30/01 at 02:54:54
Assalamu Alaikum,

          As far as I know( I heard this!), the drowned are considered to be martyrs( shaheed) and the shaheed are considered to go to jannah without any judgement.  May Allah(SWT) forgive me on my ignorance and increase my knowledge, but if that's correct what I heard of, are we still supposed to pray for them? Wallahu 'Alam.

Wassalam.
Re: Inna lillah... (pray for these three girls)
bhaloo
07/30/01 at 08:03:13
slm


Fiqh-us-Sunnah
Fiqh 4.28
The Martyrs whose Bodies must be Washed and for whom Funeral Prayer must be Performed
Those who are not killed in a battle by disbelievers, though they may be regarded as martyrs in Islamic law, should be washed and funeral prayer said for them.
The bodies of such martyrs, during the Prophet's time, were washed. Later on Muslims, during the days of 'Umar, 'Uthman, and 'Ali, continued this practice (washing the bodies of such martyrs). We give below details about these martyrs.
Jabir ibn 'Utaik reported that Allah's Messenger said: "There are seven kinds of martyrs besides those killed in the cause of Allah:
1.      a person who is killed in an epidemic,
2.      a person who is drowned,
3.      a person who has bed sores that cause fever and a bad cough resulting in his death,
4.      a person who dies of a stomach disease,
5.      a person who dies in a fire,
6.      a person who dies under falling debris (in a disaster), and
7.      a woman who dies during childbirth." Ahmad, Abu Daw'ud and Nasa'i report this hadith based on sound authority.
Abu Hurairah reported that Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, asked: "Who do you consider to be a martyr?" They said: "O Allah's Prophet, he who is killed fighting for the cause of Allah." The Prophet, peace be upon him, said: "(If this is so) then very few in my community will be martyrs! " They asked: "Who else are they, O Allah's Messenger?" He said: "He who is killed fighting for Allah's cause is a martyr, he who dies in the cause of Allah is a martyr, he who dies in an epidemic is a martyr, he who dies from a stomach disease is a martyr, and the one who dies of drowning is (also) a martyr." This hadith is narrated by Muslim.
Sa'id ibn Zaid reported that the Prophet, peace be upon him, said: "He who is killed while guarding his property is a martyr, he who is killed while defending himself is a martyr, and he who is killed defending his religion is a martyr, and he who dies protecting his family is (also) a martyr." This hadith is narrated by Ahmad and Tirmidhi. The latter considers it a sound hadith.


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