The fate of a Brooklyn cabby charged with being so enraged by his daughter ditching an arranged marriage that he ordered the her new beau’s relatives to be killed is now in the hands of a jury.
Mohammad Choudhry faces life in prison for plotting to kill the father and sister of Shujat Abbas in Pakistan — the man his daughter, Amina Ajmal, ran away with after fleeing her arranged marriage in 2013.
“From the front seat of his yellow cab, the defendant planned and executed a murder,” said federal prosecutor Richard Tucker during his closing statements Wednesday. “Even as he transported unsuspecting New Yorkers in Brooklyn and Manhattan he called the shots in Pakistan.”
Tucker reiterated to jurors that Choudhry openly threatened the lives of Abbas and his kin during recorded phone calls with his disobedient daughter and that the evidence pointed to his guilt.
“He said it over and over,” Tucker said. “He wanted to kill Shujat Abbas — the boy who helped his daughter run away from an arranged marriage. The boy who humiliated him in front of his family and village.”
With tearful relatives of the victims watching from the packed court gallery, Tucker said that they deserved justice that had eluded them in their native country.
“This is the Unites States,” Tucker said. “Here, murder is not tolerated. There is law, there is justice. You should find the defendant guilty.”
Choudhry’s defense attorney Fred Sosinsky, tried to convince jurors that members of the Abbas family who claimed to be at the scene of the slayings were actually elsewhere and could not be counted on as credible witnesses.
With his own supporters looking on, Choudhry watched stoically as the case came to a close.
Jurors begin their deliberations Thursday morning.
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01
Aug
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