(Detroit Free Press) Northville Dr. Jumana Nagarwala may be the only physician on trial on charges of performing female genital mutilation on minor girls in the U.S., but she wasn’t the only doctor who was cutting children, federal prosecutors disclosed Thursday.
Rather, they said, Nagarwala was part of a secret network of physicians in a tight-knit Indian community who were cutting 7-year-old girls across the country for years as part of a religious obligation and cultural tradition that had mothers and daughters traveling all over for the procedure.
In a courtroom hearing Thursday, the government disclosed for the first time publicly that female physicians in California and Illinois also were performing FGM procedures on minor girls who belonged to their small Indian Muslim sect, known as the Dawoodi Bohras.
