Except he wasn’t of Arab origin.

When the story first came out it was reported that he was of Arab origin—so I assumed he was a homeless Palestinian man in Davis Square that I’ve talked To. But it turned out this guy was Nepalese.

The vagrant first aroused suspicion when he was seen by employees peeking through the building’s glass façade of the Social Security building in Davis Square.

When approached by a police officer, the homeless man was carrying an empty liquor bottle and an expired Nepali passport. The officer then proceeded to notify the Feds that a potential terrorist from a “country of interest” could possibly be posing as a homeless man.

The incident came on the heels of the London train bombings. Heightened hysteria from the bombings, including a warning last summer by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that terrorists might pose as “bums,” had some in Somerville on edge.

While the episode serves as a precautionary note to officials that terrorists might conceal their identities in the form of homeless men, many Arabs and people of dark pigmentation fear that such stereotyping poses a threat to their everyday mobility. A man of dark complexion or of Arab origin, who might be your local science teacher or your daughter’s pediatrician, now has to be more cautious about where his curiosity might lead him: one peek through the wrong window might get him branded a terrorist.

Furthermore, many uninformed citizens have begun grouping people of similar skin complexion but who are of different ethnicities. Some members of the Latin American community encountered hostile acts of violence after the September 11 attacks. Nepal also happens to be a South Asian country—not West Asian, where the men of the New York City attacks were reportedly from.

Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone feels that the issue is being blown out of proportion and that Somerville is not in danger of any imminent terror attack. While some argue that you can never be too cautious, others counter that it is incidents such as this that highlight the need for a federal program intended to educate the public about world geography and xenophobia.