New Mexico police detain primary suspect in killings of four Muslim men
Albuquerque police have detained a man as the primary suspect in the killings of four Muslim men in New Mexico’s largest city.
The city’s police chief on Tuesday announced the update on Twitter. Chief Harold Medina said officers had found the vehicle that investigators believe was involved in the killings over the last nine months.
“We tracked down the vehicle believed to be involved in a recent murder of a Muslim man in Albuquerque,” the tweet said. “The driver was detained and he is our primary suspect for the murders.”
Investigator Kyle Hartsock said at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon that law enforcement had found the car they had been searching for as a result of “a tip from the community” and later elaborated that the tip was from a Muslim resident of the city.
Officers saw the suspect get into the vehicle while they were surveilling a home. They followed him and he was pulled over and detained about 120 miles east of Albuquerque, in Santa Rosa, partway to the border with Texas.
The suspect was named as Muhammad Syed, 51, a resident of Albuquerque.
He was formally charged with two of the homicides, those of Aftab Hussein, 41, and Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27, killed on 26 July and 1 August, respectively, but he is considered a suspect in all four murders.
Ahmad Assed, the president of the Islamic Center of New Mexico, said authorities had told him the suspect was a Sunni Muslim who may have had a grudge against Shia Muslims because his daughter married someone from that branch of Islam, the New York Times reported.
When asked about this by a reporter at the press conference, Medina said only: “We have some information about these events that you raise. We are not clear if that was the motive.”
Assed thanked law enforcement and political leaders and said the exhaustive efforts to apprehend a suspect had “brought me to tears”.
Medina added that he had been asked whether the department was dealing with a hate crime or a serial killer or how he would describe the situation. He said he did not have any indication that such labels would be appropriate.
Naeem Hussain was killed on Friday night, and the three other men died in ambush shootings.
Hussain, 25, was from Pakistan. Muhammad Afzaal Hussain and Aftab Hussein were also from Pakistan and members of the same mosque.
The youngest of those three men had attended the funerals of the two others on the day he was killed.
In November, Mohammad Ahmadi, 62, from Afghanistan, was killed.
Before Tuesday’s arrest, law enforcement officials had said that there was a strong possibility the killer had targeted the men because of their race and religion. Authorities also said they were canvassing for a dark gray or silver four-door Volkswagen, possibly a Jetta, with tinted windows that was thought to be linked to the killings.
The four slayings struck fear into the hearts of Albuquerque’s Muslim community, many of whom tried to stay in as much as possible while the murders were unsolved, local leaders said.