YEAH, I DID IT !
The cops say you killed your landlord by slashing his throat. Did you do it?
HE WAS QUICK to rage — and almost as quick to admit his guilt.
A Brooklyn man accused of murder and nearly chopping off his landlord’s head in a fit of anger surprisingly came right out with a confession when reporters asked him if he was guilty.
“Yes, I did it,” Rasel Siddiquee, 27, said nervously in response to questions from the press as police led him in handcuffs out of the 66th Precinct stationhouse in Borough Park on Wednesday.
Several hours earlier, at 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, the NYPD made a nick-of-time arrest, nabbing Siddiquee for the murder of Mahuddin Mahmud, 57, as the killer waited at Kennedy Airport to board a flight to Kuwait, police sources said.
His escape plan was to fly to Kuwait, then to his native Bangladesh — but he used his credit card to purchase the ticket, allowing detectives to track him to the airport, the sources said. He was charged with seconddegree murder.
When cops nabbed him, he told them that Mahmud — a married father of two, the youngest just 4 — had “humiliated and teased” him because he didn’t have a lot of money, the sources said.
Siddiquee, who is unemployed, lived in a basement flat in a building that Mahmud owned on McDonald Ave., near Avenue C, in Kensington. Mahmud, who lived elsewhere in the neighborhood, operated an electronics store on the building’s ground floor and had an office in the basement. On Tuesday morning, one of Mahmud’s brother’s found him slain in the office, his throat cut so deeply that his head was nearly severed from his body, police and his family said. He had also suffered burns to his face.
“He spent his time with his family and job,” Hanif Mahmud, 49, another brother, said of the victim. “That’s it. He’s a nice guy . . . a gentle guy. He doesn’t have any bad associations with anybody.”
Hanif Mahmud told the Daily News the family did not initially suspect Siddiquee. “We had no idea,” he said. “But when we heard he was missing and we called him and he didn’t answer the phone, then we suspected him.”
Hanif Mahmud said Siddiquee had worked as a cabbie and as a busboy, but was recently unemployed. Siddiquee used to live on the building’s second floor, but when his roommate moved out, he begged Mahmud to let him a room in the basement, where he paid just $300 a month. The family wondered how he made ends meet.
“When I visited my brother all the time I would see (Siddiquee) sleeping,” the victim’s brother added. “It was a question. How did he pay the rent?”