A suspect in the coldblooded curbside execution of a Queens imam and his assistant was in custody Monday — after cops tracked him down when his fleeing car hit a bicyclist and then an unmarked NYPD vehicle, police sources said.
The 35-year-old South Ozone Park man was taken into custody around 11 p.m. Sunday in East New York, Brooklyn, sources said.
“There’s significantly more work to be done until it gets to the point where he’s being charged with anything beyond the two [vehicular] accidents,” a high-ranking police source said.
Cops arrested the suspect after tracking him through an old-model Chevy Trailblazer similar to the one the killer was spotted getting into at the scene of the crime, sources said.
A bicyclist also went to police right after the killings to report he was hit by the vehicle as the killer fled the scene, sources said. He had written down the license plate number and gave it to cops, the sources said.
Police used the plate number to track down the Trailblazer and had it under surveillance when he drove it into an unmarked police car as it approached, a police source said.
The high-ranking source said there was not a clear motive to the murders, although police sources in Queens said there have been tensions in the largely Hispanic neighborhood as the Muslim population grows.
Video footage obtained by The Post on Sunday showed the killer pumping bullets into Imam Maulama Akonjee, 55, and Thara Uddin, 64, as they walked from the Al-Furqan mosque.
The video showed them in traditional Muslim clothing, walking near the corner of Liberty Avenue and 79th Street in Ozone Park, when the killer rushes up behind them around 2 p.m. Saturday.
He slows down as he reaches the pair and fires quickly. Then, as the victims fall face first to the sidewalk, the short-haired guman, wearing bookish eyeglasses, flees and jumps into the Trailblazer.
Police sources said they believe the killer “knew the imam and knew his schedule.”Maulama Akonjee, who was murdered Sunday: (from left) Fayez, 32, Emad, 15, Niam, 23, and Saif, 25.Photo: G.N. Miller
“My father only wanted peace,” the imam’s son Niam Akonjee, 23, told The Post. “I want whoever did this to come forward for justice. That is all we ask, for justice and to know why he killed my father.”
Homicide detectives, as well as cops from the Hate Crimes Unit, are working the case.
Mayor Bill de Blasio dispatched aides to the area to assure community members that the crime was being taken seriously.
“This weekend, our city was stung by a violence that devastated a congregation and unsettled a community,” he said in a press release. “When religious leaders are targeted, we all bear the pain those in Ozone Park feel most personally today.”
Maulama Akonjee moved to New York from Bangladesh four years ago and was initially assigned to a mosque in The Bronx, his family said Sunday.
“We will never be able to replace [him],” said Badrul Khan, the founder and chief adviser of Al-Furqan. “He was the best translator of the faith.”
Additional reporting by Larry Celona and Shawn Cohen