New York: A grand jury has returned a five-count indictment, including one for first-degree murder, against the 36-year-old man accused of the shootings of an imam and his assistant on a Queens street, prosecutors said on Monday.
Oscar Morel has also been charged with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon in the August 13 attack in the Ozone Park neighbourhood, prosecutors said.
The authorities said Morel had approached the imam, Alauddin Akonjee, 55, and his assistant, Thara Miah, 64, from behind, and shot each man in the back of the head. But officials said Monday that investigators still had not determined the motivation for the attack.
“The defendant’s alleged actions strike at the very heart of our county’s Muslim community,” the Oueens district attorney, Richard Brown, said in a statement on Monday. “Both victims were gentle men of peace, and their deaths are a devastating loss to their families and the community that they served.”
Morel was taken into custody the day after the attack and was charged on August 15. In a search of his home in East New York, Brooklyn, investigators found a .38-calibre revolver hidden inside a wall.
Ballistic tests confirmed that it was used in the attack. Investigators also found clothing that matched descriptions of what the gunman was said to be wearing, and collected video evidence that connected Morel and his vehicle, a Chevrolet sport utility vehicle, to the scene, officials said.
But Morel’s lawyer, Michael Schwed, said his client denied any involvement in the attack. Schwed took issue with a police lineup after, he said, a witness picked out someone who was not Morel as the gunman. He also said that, despite the location of the discovered gun, Morel had said the weapon was not his.
“He has no idea why that was there,” Schwed said, speaking to reporters after a brief hearing Monday in which the indictment was handed up in Queens Criminal Court. “He says he doesn’t know anything about the gun.”
