Minneapolis murder suspect arrested after decade-long escape
Minneapolis authorities have arrested and charged a suspect who fled the country for more than a decade as the shooter in a 2013 murder.
The Hennepin County Attorney's Office charged Suleiman Ali, 30, with second-degree murder. Prosecutors believe Ali shot and killed 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, North Dakota 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 October 30, 2013, Minneapolis officers responded to a shooting near Washington Avenue South and 12th Avenue South. 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 in order 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 show Ali exiting witness 1′s vehicle with a letterman-style jacket minutes before the shooting, but the case went cold that year when Ali fled the country. Investigators found new leads in Haji-Ahmed's death by 2015, but they announced no arrests.
New evidence surfaced in 2022 when a woman told homicide investigators that Ali called her the day of the murder. The woman said that Ali called because he needed money to leave the country, adding that Ali admitted to shooting Haji-Ahmed. Ali told her he must leave the country because security footage caught him on camera.
Investigators learned this March that Ali returned to the country, filing a sealed warrant to arrest him in North Dakota. He was arrested on May 1 and jailed in Hennepin County. Analysts compared Ali's DNA to the torn cloth found near that 2013 crime scene, finding that his DNA is a probable match. His next court hearing is scheduled for May 16.
Star Tribune staff librarian John Wareham contributed to this report.
