Ali Alaheri, 29, was arrested Friday in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Arson and Explosives Task Force, and the NYPD Hate Crime Unit.
Alaheri was captured on surveillance video piling garbage bags against the side of a building at 1128 36th Street, the home of Yeshiva Heichal Hatalmud of Boro Park, and setting them on fire shortly after 4 a.m. Wednesday, according to federal court papers. The FDNY quickly put out the flames.
A week earlier, Alaheri allegedly attacked a crucifix and set an American flag on fire at St. Athanasius Church on Bay Parkway at 61st Street, according to the NYPD, who announced his arrest in the incident early Saturday.
Gov. Cuomo had slammed the May 14 incident at St. Athanasius as "an act of hate."
It’s not clear what inspired Alaheri’s alleged actions.
Surveillance video played a key role in Alaheri’s arrest in both incidents, authorities said. He was allegedly caught on camera lingering around the yeshiva for hours, hopping in and out of a nearby vehicle several times and changing his clothes several times, and at some point, stopped to set the fire, authorities said.
Moments after he left the car for the last time, the camera picked up Alaheri again, "punching a Jewish man multiple times in the head with no provocation or prior interaction," the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York said in a criminal complaint. The man had been sitting in front of a nearby auto body shop when Alaheri attacked, according to the complaint.
Alaheri then jumped over a fence into an alleyway about two blocks away, stole a bicycle and rode off, according to prosecutors, who said Alaheri’s getaway was caught on surveillance video and in photos taken by a bystander.
Less than an hour later, Alaheri was ticketed by NYPD in Prospect Park for riding a bicycle in the wrong direction along a bike path. He showed the cops two forms of ID: an EBT, or food stamps, card and a state ID, and was videoed by their body cameras.
Separate footage shows a man matching Alaheri’s description outside St. Athanasius, federal court papers said.
That video shows a man wearing a gray sweatshirt and khaki pants, carrying a hammer in his back pocket, and walking toward the church from a block where several 911 callers reported a man trying to steal a bicycle.
The man can be seen setting fire to an American flag near the church, and walking toward a statue of Christ outside the view of the camera.
The statue and a crucifix were found damaged the following morning. "The face of Jesus was on the ground—in the dirt," Monsignor David Cassato, the pastor of St. Athanasius recalled Saturday.
A Brooklyn man facing federal arson charges for trying to set fire to a yeshiva is also connected to vandalism at a Catholic church and two assaults in the borough, according to officials.
Alaheri is also connected to an assault on a Hasidic man just blocks from the yeshiva and on a Black man in the subway a few weeks earlier, documents show.
Alaheri has been charged with arson and faces a maximum of 20 years in prison if convicted, officials said.
He was initially charged with criminal mischief as a hate crime for the vandalism at the church, though, according to the New York Times
...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
, the Brooklyn District Attorney is not pursuing charges against him.