Suspect charged in daylight slaying of New York imam and friend

A man suspected in the fatal shooting of an imam and his friend as they left a mosque in New York City was arrested on charges of second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon late Monday.

Charges against 35-year-old Oscar Morel, of Brooklyn, were upgraded after police say they recovered a revolver at his home and clothes similar to that being worn in surveillance video that shows the gunman.

Morel was arrested Sunday after police said he hit a bicyclist 10 minutes after Saturday’s shooting in Queens, amid wide-ranging suspicions he had also shot Imam Maulana Alauddin Akonjee and Thara Uddin in broad daylight.

“We strongly believe this is the individual,” the New York Police Department’s chief of detectives, Robert Boyce, said of Morel after the initial arrest was announced.

It wasn’t immediately clear if he had an attorney who can comment on the charges.

Authorities have not said what prompted the daytime shooting of Akonjee and Uddin.

According to police, Morel can be seen on video surveillance fleeing the area of the shooting in a black GMC Trailblazer just after Akonjee and Uddin were shot.

About 10 minutes later, a car matching that description struck a bicyclist about three miles away in Brooklyn, Boyce said.

Morel was arrested late Sunday night outside a Brooklyn apartment after intentionally ramming his car into an unmarked police cruiser trying to block him in, Boyce said.

The arrest was announced just hours after about 1,000 people gathered under tents to praise Akonjee, 55, and Uddin, 64, in an Islamic funeral service where emotions ran high.

The ceremony featured several speakers who said they believed the victims were targeted because of their religion. Some members of the congregation shouted, “Justice!” periodically throughout the service.

After the ceremony, part of the crowd marched to the spot a few blocks away where the shooting took place.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations offered a $10,000 reward for any information that could lead to the arrest or conviction of the perpetrators.

Community leaders, clearly rattled by rising Islamophobia, slammed “xenophobic statements” made against Muslims speech by “politicians and candidates seeking the highest office in the land” — a clear reference to Donald Trump.

Trump, the New York billionaire and Republican nominee, used a keynote address Monday to demand ideological screening tests for immigrants, saying immigrants had been responsible for a string of extremist attacks in America.

One speaker demanded security cameras be erected outside mosques and for the street where the two men were shot to be renamed in their honor.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, told those gathered that the entire city was “mourning with you.”

“We will make sure that whoever did this is brought to justice, I can guarantee you that,” de Blasio said.

“We know there are voices all over this country who are spewing hate, trying to create division, trying to turn one American against another,” he said.

“We’re not going to let them continue to encourage acts of hatred.”

Authorities did not release a motive for the killings, though Boyce said the possibility that the murders were a hate crime is “certainly on the table.”

Akonjee had been carrying more than $1,000, but the attacker did not take the money, police said.

Some in the largely Bangladeshi Muslim community in Queens and Brooklyn have described harassment in recent months by people who shouted anti-Muslim epithets.

Boyce said earlier the suspect may have worked in a Brooklyn warehouse but wouldn’t comment any further on his background, mental state or whether he had invoked his right to counsel.