Police link gun to death of imam

Weapon, clothes hidden in suspect’s NYC apartment wall

Oscar Morel, who faces murder charges in the shooting deaths of an imam and another man, makes a court appearance Tuesday in the Queens borough of New York.
Oscar Morel, who faces murder charges in the shooting deaths of an imam and another man, makes a court appearance Tuesday in the Queens borough of New York.

NEW YORK -- The suspect in the "assassination" of an imam and his friend after they left a mosque had the murder weapon stashed in the wall of his basement apartment, investigators said Tuesday.

New York Police Department investigators determined that the .38-caliber revolver was the weapon used in the ambush near the Al-Furqan Jame Masjid mosque in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, a prosecutor told a judge at Oscar Morel's initial court appearance.

Police charged Morel, 35, with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon. The Queens district attorney's office added a single count of first-degree murder for what Assistant District Attorney Peter McCormack called "a most horrendous and despicable act that can only be described as as a coldblooded, premeditated assassination."

Though the motive remained unclear, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said the attack was being viewed as a possible hate crime. The first-degree murder charge, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison without parole, was added because the attack was believed to be "the intentional killing of two individuals during the same transaction," Brown said in a statement.

Morel "is accused of the murder of a highly respected and beloved religious leader and his friend as they walked home from an afternoon prayer service," said Brown, who met Tuesday with family members of the victims. "Their deaths are a devastating loss to their families and the community that they served as men of peace."

Defense attorney Leonard Ressler said Morel denied any involvement in the shootings, telling the lawyer, "I didn't do anything." McCormack also said Morel had denied the crime but had agreed he is the person captured on security video of a vehicle before and after the killings.

Morel, who was employed as a porter at a Manhattan college, did not enter a plea. He was ordered held without bail and is to return to court Thursday.

Police said they believe Morel was waiting near the mosque for at least eight minutes on Saturday before Imam Maulana Alauddin Akonjee and Thara Uddin were each shot in the back of the head. Authorities believe that Morel fled in a black GMC Trailblazer that struck a bicyclist 10 minutes after the shooting.

After finding the vehicle parked on the street, police waited for Morel to return. He was captured after getting into the car and ramming a police car while trying to flee, investigators said.

Police officers searching the Brooklyn home where Morel was arrested late Sunday found the suspected murder weapon -- as well as clothes they believe he was wearing at the time of the shooting -- behind a section of the wall that had been cut out and reinstalled with screws, authorities said.

The killings have stoked fear and anger in the largely Bangladeshi Muslim community in Queens and Brooklyn.

"It is a hate crime. I believe that," Uddin's brother, Mashuk, said outside court on Tuesday. "This is a terrible crime."

Information for this article was contributed by Jake Pearson and Ezra Kaplan of The Associated Press; and by Rick Rojas, Noah Remnick and Emily Palmer of The New York Times.

A Section on 08/17/2016

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