Arrest made in 2005 cold case murder of NY man found dead in Windsor Locks

An arrest has been made in a decades-old cold case out of Windsor Locks.

In February of 2005, Mureed Hussain was found murdered, his body tossed over a guardrail in the area of South Main Street and School Street.

Windsor Locks police said Hussain was working as a construction worker back, and to help make ends meet and support his family, he took a job as an overnight cab driver.

That’s when police say three men approached him for a ride to Enfield. For reasons unknown, he pulled off in Windsor Locks.

“South Main Street and School Street, that’s where we believe the shooting took place,” Windsor Locks Det. Sgt. Jeff Lampson said. “We believe the cab driver was in his van, was either compelled to pull over or pulled over under his own volition, was shot in the car, and then pulled out, thrown over the guardrail, and his vehicle was located in Brooklyn.”

After a few years, the case went cold. Though police at the time identified three suspects.

Last year, detectives picked back up the case after a lull in the department.

“We took it out of cold storage, and we just studied the case, we just examined what had been done back in ’05, what had not been done,” Lampson said. “They had developed three names, three suspects, and then it just, for whatever reason died out. We picked it up from there, and through the advancements in forensic tech, DNA specifically, we were able to develop some pretty strong leads.”

Those leads led them to Brooklyn and Manhattan, New York, and they tied two suspects to the crime through DNA.

“We took the evidence that we had, and we sent it to the lab to process an untraced touch DNA. We developed profiles from that, and those profiles matched two of the three suspects that had been identified back in ’05," Lampson said.

One of those suspects, 38-year-old Mohammad Ali, was arrested at his home in Ohio last month. He was extradited back to Connecticut, and on Wednesday, was arraigned in Hartford Superior Court on charges in connection to Hussain’s murder.

“Mr. Ali maintains his innocence. Mr. Ali is looking forward to obviously challenging the claims that have been made in the warrant,” his attorney said in court.

Hussain’s sons were in the courtroom along with their mother. They drove up from Brooklyn to witness the arraignment.

“We are grateful for the work of the police department and for the efforts of everybody involved to bring our family some peace,” Huzaifa Mureed said. “He’s my father, and unfortunately, I can’t say much because I didn’t know him myself. I was only four when he passed away. He was a good man, he worked to provide for his family, and he was out providing for his family when…the night he was murdered.”

A motive is still unclear, and police aren’t sure who fired the fatal shot.

“We definitely want to know the why. That’s critical,” Lampson said.

Police say the investigation is far from over, as they hope to arrest one more suspect.

“There are two additional suspects, one of which is dead, unrelated to our homicide, he was killed in Brooklyn in 2020,” Lampson said. “The third suspect we are still actively pursuing through forensics.”

Lampson said he apologized to Hussain’s family for this case falling through the cracks.

“I apologized,” he said, “because I said this shouldn’t have fallen through the cracks. I believe that, you know, there was enough back then…even though maybe the DNA hadn’t been advanced, there were still things I believe could have been pursued a little more aggressively.”