ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — In the six years since he settled in the United States from Afghanistan, the prime suspect in the slayings of four Muslim men in Albuquerque has been arrested several times for domestic violence and caught on camera slashing the tires of a woman’s car, police say and court records.
The ongoing pattern of violence — which began shortly after Muhammad Syed arrived in the states — shocked members of the town’s small, close-knit Muslim community, some of whom knew him from the local mosque and who initially assumed the killer was an outsider with a bias toward the Islamic faith. Now they come to terms with the idea that they never understood this person.
“I think based on knowing his history now — and we didn’t know before — he’s clearly a disturbed individual. He clearly has a penchant for violence,” said Ahmad Assed, president of the Islamic Center of New Mexico.
Police say Syed, 51, was familiar with his victims and may have been motivated by “interpersonal conflicts.”
He was arrested Monday night and remains in custody. Prosecutors say he is a dangerous man and plan to ask a judge next week to keep him in custody pending trial on murder charges in connection with two of the shooting deaths. Syed is also the prime suspect in the other two murders, but police say they won’t rush to charge him in those cases as long as he remains behind bars and poses no threat to the public. The married father of six denied involvement in the murders; His defense attorneys declined to comment.
Few details have emerged publicly about Syed’s life before he and his family came to America in 2016, but a U.S. government document obtained by The Associated Press says he graduated from Rehman Baba High School in western Kabul in 1990 Between 2010 and 2012, he worked as a cook at Al Bashar Jala Construction Company.
In December 2012, Syed fled Afghanistan with his wife and children, the report said. The family heads to Pakistan, where Syed looks for work as a refrigeration technician. A native Pashto speaker who was also fluent in Dari, he was admitted to the United States in 2016 as a refugee.
The very next year, according to court records, a friend of Syed’s daughter alleged that Syed, his wife and one of Syed’s sons pulled him out of a car and punched and kicked him before driving off. The boyfriend, who was found with a bloody nose, scratches and bruises, told police he was attacked because Syed, a Sunni Muslim, did not want his daughter to have a relationship with a Shiite man.
In 2018, Syed was arrested after an argument with his wife about her driving. Syed told police his wife hit him in the car, but she said he pulled her by the hair, threw her to the ground and made her walk the two hours to their destination.
Months later, Syed allegedly beat his wife and attacked one of his sons with a large, jagged metal spoon that left his hair drenched in blood, according to court documents. Syed’s wife told police everything was fine. But the son who called them told officers that Syed routinely beat him and his mother.
Two of the cases were dropped after the wife and boyfriend declined to press charges. The third was fired after Syed completed a pre-intervention program. In 2020, Syed was arrested after he allegedly refused to stop for police after running a traffic light, but that case was eventually dismissed as well.
“If you’re trying to understand how violence develops in a particular person, you just have to know that he didn’t wake up last year and become a serial killer,” said former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole. “He had a history of violence. And that’s the challenge for law enforcement … to identify what your experience with violence is and when it started?”
Syed told detectives he served in the Afghan National Army’s Special Operations Command, a small, elite group of Afghan soldiers who fought the Taliban. He said he liked the AK-47-style weapon police found in his house because he had used one in Afghanistan.
Yet a U.S. government profile reviewed by the AP lists no military experience, and Syed turned 40 the year the elite force was formed in 2011 — likely too old to be selected to fight in the -the tough battles.
“That sounds a little suspicious,” said Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis, who served two tours in Afghanistan and is a senior fellow and military expert at the Defense Priorities think tank. He said that while Syed may have been a soldier, “special forces guys are usually 22, 25, maybe 30, because it’s very physically demanding.”
The Sayeds live in a small duplex in the south of the city, a working-class section where many of the older homes and apartments have security bars attached to their doors and windows. The area has become a magnet for Afghan refugees and other immigrants seeking a new home in New Mexico’s largest city.
The killings of the four men — the first in November and the other three in quick succession over a period of less than two weeks in July and the first week of August — sent shockwaves through Albuquerque’s Muslim community of about 4,500. Residents were afraid to leave their homes – to the point where city officials offered to deliver food – and some considered leaving the city.
That’s exactly what Syed told investigators he was doing when he left in his Volkswagen Jetta on Sunday: heading out of state to find a safer place for his frightened family.
Police say he actually fled the city after killing Naeem Hussain just days before.
Syed is the primary suspect — but not charged — in the death of Hussain, a 25-year-old Pakistani man who was fatally shot Aug. 5 in the parking lot of a refugee resettlement agency in southeast Albuquerque; and the killing of Muhammad Zahir Ahmadi, a 62-year-old Afghan immigrant who was fatally shot in the head last November behind a market he owned in the city.
Ahmadi is the brother-in-law of the woman whose tires Syed slashed in 2020, while Syed and Hussain have known each other since 2016, police said.
Syed is accused of killing Aftab Hussain and Muhammad Afzal Hussain. Hussain, 41, was killed on the night of July 26 after parking his car in his usual spot near his home. Afzal Hussain, a 27-year-old urban planner who worked on the New Mexico congressman’s campaign, was gunned down on the night of August 1 while taking his evening walk.
Although Syed told the police that he recognized Hussain from parties in the community, it is not clear how he knew Afzaal Hussain.
Despite the violence he allegedly inflicted on his wife and children, Syed’s family stands by him.
“My father is not a person who can kill anybody,” his daughter recently told CNN, which did not identify her to protect her safety. “My father always talked about peace. That is why we are here in the United States. We came from Afghanistan, from fighting, from shooting.
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Dazio reported from Los Angeles and Watson from San Diego.
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