Minneapolis authorities have arrested and charged a suspect who left the country for more than a decade, alleging he was the shooter in a 2013 murder.
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office charged Suleiman Ali, 30, with second-degree murder. Prosecutors accuse Ali of killing 26-year-old Abdirahman Haji-Ahmed more than a decade ago outside Bobby and Steve’s Auto World downtown.
Ali was arrested in Grand Forks, N.D., before being jailed in Hennepin County on May 1. Prosecutors asked Judge Kathleen Sheehy to set Ali’s bail at $2 million.
According to charging documents:
Just before midnight on Oct. 30, 2013, Minneapolis officers responded to a shooting near 12th and Washington avenues S. There, outside the gas station, they found a dead man with multiple bullet wounds inside a running car. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner identified that man as Haji-Ahmed.
Investigators collected five bullet cartridges from inside the vehicle, and further testing suggested the bullets were shot from a gun held by someone in the backseat. No suspects were at the scene, but a security guard said a man wearing a letterman-style jacket jumped a nearby fence and fled. Officers found a torn piece of cloth near that fence.
Authorities searched Haji-Ahmed’s phone records and found that he called a woman eight minutes before his death. That woman, identified as “witness 1,” said she drove to the gas station with her male friend and an unknown man to buy marijuana from Haji-Ahmed. Police arrested witness 1 after she refused to identify the men she traveled with. Calls from jail suggested she was covering up the incident for the shooter.
Surveillance footage from the gas station showed Ali exiting witness 1′s vehicle with a letterman-style jacket minutes before the shooting, authorities said, but the case went cold that year when Ali left the country. Investigators found new leads in Haji-Ahmed’s death by 2015, but they announced no arrests.
