A Brooklyn jury took just over an hour Thursday to convict a cabby of orchestrating a pair of brutal honor-killing murders after his daughter ditched her arranged marriage.
Mohammad Choudhry, 61, showed little emotion after the verdict was announced in the packed Brooklyn federal courtroom while his friends and family bowed their heads in the court gallery.
Prosecutors said Choudhry — a city hack for more than 20 years — was so enraged that his 23-year-old daughter left her husband for another man that he had the new beau’s father and sister fatally shot in Pakistan.
Choudhry was done in at trial largely by recorded phone calls between him and daughter Amina Ajmal, in which he repeatedly vowed to erase boyfriend Shujat Abbas’s entire family to exact revenge for his own humiliation by her.
“He said it over and over,” federal prosecutor Richard Tucker said during closing arguments Wednesday. “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.”
But before Choudhry could get to Abbas, he took out Abbas’s father, Mohammad Asghar, and sister Madeeha Asghar. They were riddled with bullets as they rode on a motorcycle in February 2013.
Choudhry deployed an uncle and some other men from his village of Chirawala to carry out the hits, calling the shots from the driver’s seat of his yellow cab, prosecutors said.
The killings came after Choudhry begged his daughter to return to their family home. In their phone calls, he assured her that death would result from a failure to do so.
“Until I find you, nothing is going to stop me,” he said. “I am going to kill their whole family.”
Choudhry said that having a daughter flee the family was an intolerable humiliation.
Ajmal testified at trial that she had wanted no part of her coerced December 2012 marriage to Abrar Ahmed Babar and that her heart was set on eventually marrying Abbas, a distant relative from the same village.
But Ajmal — who attended Brooklyn College and was raised in America — wasn’t given an option, she said.
Choudhry labeled the Abbas clan as “immoral” and “bastards” for trying to convince her daughter to abandon her feelings.
After maintaining secret contact with Abbas through hidden cell phones, Ajmal eventually hopped in his car in the dead of night and fled the home she shared with Babar in January 2013.
Fearing her father’s rage and his willingness to take out members of Abbas’s family, Ajmal began working with federal agents and recorded her fraught exchanges with the increasingly desperate patriarch.
Tortured by her disappearance and unable to track her down, Choudhry told his daughter that everything would calm down if she simply returned home.
After she refused, Choudhry promised that there was only one remaining route to the restoration of his family’s honor — bloodshed.
Ajmal tearfully testified against her father at trial and admitted that she still loved him and never believed he was capable of killing.
Choudhry broke down and wept during his daughter’s testimony.
Neither his daughter nor the victims’ relatives were in court for the verdict.
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