A man has been taken into custody and questioned in relation to the shooting of an imam and his assistant in Queens on Saturday, a police spokesperson said on Monday.
The spokesperson said the man was taken into custody overnight for an unrelated incident and was being questioned in relation to the shooting of Maulama Akonjee, 55 – the imam of Al-Furqan mosque in the Ozone Park section of the New York City borough – and his assistant Thara Uddin, 64.
Surveillance footage released on Sunday showed a man hurriedly walking up behind Akonjee and Uddin as they walked down a street in broad daylight, before both men collapsed instantly. The man, dressed in a dark shirt and blue shorts, then walked away from the scene with a gun still in hand.
Several Muslim groups denounced the attack as a hate crime, citing the fact that Akonjee had hundreds of dollars on him that were not stolen, eliminating the possibility of a robbery.
According to the Daily News, the attack may have been part of a wider Hispanic-Muslim turf war. The shooter reportedly hit a cyclist with his car during a hurried escape, who took his license plate number down and notified the police.
The New York police department has not cited any possible motivation but the hate crime unit is reportedly working on the case. On Sunday, the NYPD released a sketch of the shooter showing a bearded man with dark hair and glasses.
According to Akonjee’s daughter, the two men lived on the same street and would regularly walk to and from the mosque together.
Members of the Bangladeshi community held a rally on Saturday in which they chanted, “We want justice.” Several members of the community said they felt unsafe in the area due to prejudice against Muslims.
“It’s really threatening to us, threatening to our future, threatening to our mobility in our neighborhood, and we’re looking for the justice,” Millat Uddin, an Ozone Park resident told CBS New York.
The Council of American-Islamic Relations is planning to announce a $10,000 reward for any information about the shooting.
New York’s Mayor Bill De Blasio released a statement in which he said, “While we do not yet know the motivation for the murders of Maulama Akonjee and Thara Uddin, we do know that our Muslim communities are in the perpetual crosshairs of bigotry.”
