Three Muslim men were shot dead in Albuquerque, New Mexico, within about two weeks in the summer of 2022. Aftab Hussein, forty-one, a Pakistani immigrant, was found beside his car on Rhode Island Street on July 26; the gunman had waited behind a wall and bushes and fired at him repeatedly with an AK-47. Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, twenty-seven, a city planner, was killed days later. Naeem Hussain, twenty-five, was shot in his car in a parking lot on August 5, having just attended the funeral services held for the other two men at the Islamic Center of New Mexico.
The killings were assumed at the time to be a campaign against Muslims, and the fear they caused was real and city-wide. That is not what the prosecution ended up alleging. The man arrested was himself a Muslim, an Afghan refugee named Muhammad Syed, and 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 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. The case against him rested on cellphone location data placing his phone in the area of the shooting, and on ballistics: casings and projectiles from the scene were matched to a rifle found hidden under his bed. His lawyer argued there was nothing to show Syed had fired it, 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. That September 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. A plea of no contest is not an admission of guilt, and at his sentencing in November 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 a minimum of thirty years before he can be considered for parole.
Police also named Syed as a suspect in the killing of Mohammad Ahmadi, shot in November 2021 outside a business he ran with his brother. He was never charged with that death, and it is not among his convictions.
The New Mexico Supreme Court affirmed the first-degree murder conviction in May 2026, rejecting his argument that the evidence was insufficient to prove he was the shooter or that he had acted with intent to kill.