Three Muslim men were shot dead in Albuquerque, New Mexico, within about ten days in the summer of 2022. Aftab Hussein, forty-one, a Pakistani immigrant of Hazara background, was found beside his car outside his home on Rhode Island Street on the night of July 26. He had just pulled in; the hood of the car was still warm when police arrived and his key fob lay beside him. The gunman had waited behind a wall and bushes and shot him eleven times. On August 1 Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, twenty-seven, a Pakistani American who worked as a city planner and had also worked on the campaign of Representative Melanie Stansbury, was killed in a drive-by shooting. On August 5 Naeem Hussain, twenty-five, was shot in his car in a parking lot, having just attended the funeral services for the other two men at the Islamic Center of New Mexico. His death was what led police to connect the killings.
Police also went back to an earlier one. On November 7, 2021, Mohammad Ahmadi, an Afghan American, had been shot dead outside a business he ran with his brother.
The killings were assumed at the time to be a campaign against Muslims, and the fear they caused was real and citywide. Muslim businesses closed for days, families stayed indoors or left the state, and security was raised at the area's mosques. That is not what the prosecution ended up alleging. The man arrested was himself a Muslim and a well-known member of the local community, an Afghan refugee named Muhammad Atif Syed, fifty-one. Police said at the time that he knew the victims to some extent and that the killings may have grown out of interpersonal conflict as well as sectarian hatred; a brother of one of the dead said he did not believe they were religiously motivated. No motive was ever established. The prosecutor David Waymire told reporters after the verdict that there was only minimal conjecture available, and that the motive might be a random serial-killer mentality that would never be understood.
Syed had worked as a cook in Afghanistan. He and his family fled to Pakistan in 2012 and were admitted to the United States as refugees in 2016. He claimed to have fought the Taliban in an elite unit of the Afghan National Army, but his United States government profile listed no military service, and an expert on the subject called the claim fishy. Beginning the year after he arrived, he was arrested three times for domestic violence, and one of his sons said he had beaten him and his mother repeatedly. All three cases were dismissed, the first two when the alleged victims declined to press charges and the third after he completed a pretrial intervention program. A charge of failing to pull over for police was dismissed too.
He was stopped in a vehicle near Santa Rosa, about 120 miles east of Albuquerque, days after the last shooting, and told police he was driving to Texas to find somewhere else for his family to live because the situation in Albuquerque was bad. On August 9 police announced his arrest. He was charged with the killings of Aftab Hussein and Muhammad Afzaal Hussain on August 10 and with that of Naeem Hussain on August 19, and he denied all of them. Federal prosecutors also sought to hold one of his sons, citing phone records and a pistol found in the son's room in connection with up to two of the killings; the son's lawyer called the case exceedingly thin, and the son was never charged with any killing. He pleaded guilty to a separate federal count of giving a false address when buying a gun and served seventy days.
The case against the father rested on cellphone location data placing his phone in the area of the shootings and on ballistics. A firearms expert testified that a bullet taken from Aftab Hussein's body came from an AK-47-style semi-automatic rifle that police found under Syed's bed, and a gun store clerk testified that Syed had bought the rifle and collected it a week and a half before that killing. A 9mm Springfield Armory pistol he had bought on January 28, 2021, was also identified as a murder weapon in the series. His lawyer argued there was nothing to show Syed had fired either gun, and that others in the household had access to the phone, the vehicle and the rifle.
He was tried first for the killing of Aftab Hussein alone. The trial ran four days with twenty witnesses, he did not testify, and the jury convicted him of first-degree murder on March 18, 2024, after less than two hours. On September 3 he pleaded no contest to two counts of second-degree murder over the other two deaths, under a deal that dropped four counts of tampering with evidence and set thirty years for those two, to run concurrently with the first. A plea of no contest is not an admission of guilt, and at his sentencing on November 8, 2024, he spoke through an interpreter to deny responsibility for any of the killings and to ask to be allowed to return to Afghanistan with his family. Judge Britt Baca sentenced him to life, with the possibility of parole after thirty years.
He was never charged with the death of Mohammad Ahmadi, and it is not among his convictions.
On May 7, 2026, the New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the first-degree murder conviction in an opinion by Justice Michael E. Vigil, rejecting his arguments that the evidence could not prove he was the shooter or that he had acted with deliberate intent. The state, the court wrote, had shown that he was more closely connected to the car, the rifle and the phone used in the murder than anyone else.