Police charge Brooklyn man for murder of imam and assistant outside mosque

On Monday night, New York police charged Oscar Morel, 35, with two counts of second-degree murder for the fatal shooting on Saturday of a Muslim religious leader and his associate outside their mosque in Queens. Police had taken Morel into custody on Sunday night after tracing his car through surveillance video; he was initially held for an unrelated hit-and-run and for ramming into a police car when the NYPD approached him. The imam, Alauddin Akonjee, 55, and assistant Thara Miah, 64, were shot in the head, and police said Monday that they are still not sure of the motive.

Upon searching Morel's home in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, police found the suspected murder weapon and clothes that matched descriptions of what the assailant was wearing, both hidden in a recently sealed cavity in the wall, an unidentified police official tells The New York Times. "Because of the evidence so far, we strongly believe this is the individual," NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said. As for motive, "we're still drilling down on it," and it's "certainly on the table that it's a hate crime," though for now, "we can't explain why that person was there."

Akonjee, the leader of the Al-Furqan Jame Masjid mosque in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, came to the U.S. in 2011 from Bangladesh to provide a better future for his seven children. The Bangladesh Muslim community clustered around Ozone Park was on high alert after the murders, believing them to be motivated by anti-Muslim animus. Mayor Bill de Blasio attended Monday's funeral prayers for Akonjee and Miah. "It's a very rare thing to see a cleric killed, and the Muslim community has already been on edge," de Blasio told reporters afterward. "I assured the members of the community the NYPD would be out in force."

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