ALBUQUERQUE: An Afghan refugee convicted of first-degree murder in one of three fatal shootings in 2022 that shook Albuquerque’s Muslim community pleaded no contest Tuesday to two homicide charges stemming from the other killings.
Prosecutors said Muhammad Syed, 53, entered the pleas to two counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27, and Naeem Hussain.
A jury had convicted Syed in March in the shooting death of Aftab Hussein, 41, in July 2022.
The three ambush-style killings happened over the course of several days, leaving authorities scrambling to determine if race or religion might have been behind the shootings. Investigators soon shifted away from possible hate crimes to what prosecutors called the “willful and very deliberate” actions of another member of the Muslim community.
Syed, who settled in the US with his family several years earlier, denied involvement in the killings after being stopped more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) from Albuquerque. He told authorities he was on his way to Texas to find a new home for his family, saying he was concerned about the killings in Albuquerque.
Bernalillo County prosecutors said Syed faces a life prison sentence in Aftab Hussein’s killings and will serve 30 years behind bars for the no-contest pleas. A sentencing date hasn’t been set.
Authorities said Afzaal Hussain, an urban planner, was gunned down Aug. 1, 2022, while taking his evening walk. Naeem Hussain was shot four days later as he sat in his vehicle outside a refugee resettlement agency on the city’s south side.
After Syed’s conviction in March, prosecutors acknowledged that no testimony during the trial nor any court filings addressed a possible motive. Prosecutors had described him as having a violent history, but his public defenders argued that previous allegations of domestic violence never resulted in convictions.
Afghan refugee pleads no contest to 2 murders in case that shocked Albuquerque’s Muslim community
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Afghan refugee pleads no contest to 2 murders in case that shocked Albuquerque’s Muslim community
- Muhammad Syed, 53, entered pleas to two counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27, and Naeem Hussain
- Three ambush-style killings happened over the course of several days in 2022, leaving authorities scrambling to determine if race or religion was involved
Power outages hit Ukraine and Moldova as Kyiv struggles against the winter cold
- Outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova
- Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions
KYIV: Emergency power cuts swept across several Ukrainian cities as well as neighboring Moldova on Saturday, officials said, amid a commitment from the Kremlin to US President Donald Trump to pause strikes on Kyiv as Ukraine battles one of its bleakest winters in years.
Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said that the outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova.
The failure “caused a cascading outage in Ukraine’s power grid,” triggering automatic protection systems, he said.
Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions, in the center and northeast of the country respectively. The outage cut water supplies to the Ukrainian capital, officials said, while the city’s subway system was temporarily suspended because of low voltage on the network.
Moldova also experienced major power outages, including in the capital Chisinau, officials said.
“Due to the loss of power lines on the territory of Ukraine, the automatic protection system was triggered, which disconnected the electricity supply,” Moldova’s Energy Minister Dorin Junghietu said in a post on Facebook. “I encourage the population to stay calm until electricity is restored.”
Weaponizing winter
The large-scale outage followed weeks of Russian strikes against Ukraine’s already struggling energy grid, which have triggered long stretches of severe power shortages.
Moscow has sought to deny Ukrainian civilians heat, light and running water over the course of the war, in a strategy that Ukrainian officials describe as “weaponizing winter.”
While Russia has used similar tactics throughout the course of its almost four-year invasion of Ukraine, temperatures throughout this winter have fallen further than usual, bringing widespread hardship to civilians.
Forecasters say Ukraine will experience a brutally cold period stretching into next week. Temperatures in some areas will drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
Trump said late Thursday that President Vladimir Putin had agreed to a temporary pause in targeting Kyiv and other Ukrainian towns amid the extreme weather.
“I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and the cities and towns for a week during this ... extraordinary cold,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Putin has “agreed to that,” he said, without elaborating on when the request to the Russian leader was made.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a query seeking clarity about the scope and timing of any limited pause.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed Friday that Trump “made a personal request” to Putin to stop targeting Kyiv until Sunday “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations.”
Talks are expected to take place between US, Russian and Ukrainian officials on Feb. 1 in Abu Dhabi. The teams previously met in late January in the first known time that officials from the Trump administration simultaneously met with negotiators from both Ukraine and Russia. However, it’s unclear many obstacles to peace remain. Disagreement over what happens to occupied Ukrainian territory, and Moscow’s demand for possession of territory it hasn’t captured, are a key issue holding up a peace deal, Zelensky said Thursday.
Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev said on social media Saturday that he was in Miami, where talks between Russian and US negotiators have previously taken place.
Russia struck Ukrainian energy assets in several regions on Thursday but there were no strikes on those facilities overnight, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday.
In a post on social media, Zelensky also noted that Russia has turned its attention to targeting Ukrainian logistics networks, and that Russian drones and missiles hit residential areas of Ukraine overnight, as they have most nights during the war.
Trump has framed Putin’s acceptance of the pause in strikes as a concession. But Zelensky was skeptical as Russia’s invasion approaches its fourth anniversary on Feb. 24 with no sign that Moscow is willing to reach a peace settlement despite a US-led push to end the fighting.
“I do not believe that Russia wants to end the war. There is a great deal of evidence to the contrary,” Zelensky said Thursday.
