New Mexico Muslim community grapples with shock after Afghan immigrant arrested in killings
Muslims in New Mexico interviewed on Wednesday mentioned they felt shock and disgrace on the arrest of a Muslim immigrant from Afghanistan in reference to the murders of 4 Muslim males.
Police on Tuesday mentioned they detained 51-year-old Muhammad Syed. A motive for the killings stays unclear, however police mentioned he could have acted on private grudges, presumably with intra-Muslim sectarian overtones.
Syed denied being concerned with any of the 4 killings when questioned by police, based on the New York Instances.
“We’re in full whole disbelief. Speechless. You realize, type of embarrassed to say he was one in all our personal,” mentioned Mula Akbar, an Afghan-American businessman who mentioned he had helped Syed settle within the metropolis.
“His hatred of Shias may need had one thing to do with it,” Akbar mentioned.
Syed was from the Sunni department of Islam and prayed collectively at Albuquerque’s Islamic Heart of New Mexico (ICNM) mosque with a lot of the victims, three of whom have been from the Shia department of Islam. All 4 victims have been of Afghan or Pakistani descent. One was killed in November, the opposite three within the final two weeks.
Syed, who made his first look in court docket Wednesday, was formally charged with killing Aftab Hussein, 41, on July 26 and Muhammed Afzaal Hussain, 27, on Aug. 1.
Police mentioned on Tuesday they have been working with prosecutors on potential expenses for the murders of Naeem Hussain, 25, a truck driver killed on Friday, and Mohammad Ahmadi, 62, shot lifeless on Nov. 7, 2021, exterior the grocery retailer he ran together with his brother in southeast Albuquerque.
It was not instantly clear if Syed had retained a lawyer.
Police declined to touch upon rumours Syed was offended one in all his daughters had eloped and married a Shia man.
The daughter instructed CNN that her husband was pals with two of the boys who have been killed, Aftab Hussein and Naeem Hussain. The lady, who CNN didn’t identify out of concern for her security, mentioned her father was not glad when she married in 2018 however had turn into accepting extra not too long ago.
“My father is just not an individual who can kill any individual. My father has at all times talked about peace. That is why we’re right here in the USA. We got here from Afghanistan, from preventing, from taking pictures,” she instructed CNN.
Palestinian-American Samia Assed mentioned the Muslim group of round 4,000 in Albuquerque had work to do to stop violence they left behind in nations like Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“This took me again to 9/11 after I simply needed to cover beneath a rock,” mentioned the human rights activist after she hosted an interfaith memorial on the ICNM, Albuquerque’s oldest and largest mosque.
“For this to occur it is like setting us again 100 years,” she mentioned.
The mosque is nonsectarian, serves primarily Sunnis from over 30 nations and has by no means earlier than skilled violence of this sort, based on congregants interviewed by Reuters.
Syed is a truck driver, has six youngsters, is from Pashtun ethnicity and arrived in the USA as a refugee about six years in the past from Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province, mentioned Akbar, a former U.S. diplomat who labored on Afghan points and helped discovered the Afghan Society of New Mexico.
Syed developed a report of prison misdemeanours during the last three or 4 years, together with a case of home violence, police mentioned.
Video from February 2020 confirmed him slashing the tires of a car on the ICNM believed to be owned by the household of the primary recognized sufferer, Ahmadi, based on the mosque’s president, legal professional Ahmad Assed.
