MINNEAPOLIS — A man who prosecutors say fled the country after killing someone outside a busy gas station in 2013 is back in Minneapolis and charged with murder.
Prosecutors say 30-year-old Suleiman Abdulkadir Ali is being held in the Hennepin County jail on charges of second-degree murder, which took place the night before Halloween. He is in custody due to a tip police received in 2022, and what investigators say is a subsequent DNA match.
Minneapolis police squads were dispatched to Bobby and Steve's Auto World at the intersection of Washington Avenue South and 12th Avenue South just before midnight. When officers arrived they found 26-year-old Abdirahman Haji-Ahmed sitting in the driver's seat of a running vehicle, shot multiple times in the head. Haji-Ahmed was pronounced dead on the scene.
A security guard on duty told police she had seen a man wearing a multi-colored letterman-style jacket jumping a fence and running away following the shooting.
Investigators recovered five .45 shells from inside the vehicle, and determined that all the shots had been fired from the back seat of the vehicle. They also found a torn piece of cloth next to a fence that was believed to be from the shooter's jacket.
Prosecutors say a phone number recovered from the victim's phone led them to a woman who told police she had driven to Bobby and Steve's with her boyfriend and another man she didn't know to buy weed from Haji-Ahmed. She refused to say what happened or identify the two men.
Surveillance video captured a man in a letterman-style jacket, later identified as Suleiman Abdulkadir Ali, getting out of the woman's vehicle about ten minutes before the fatal shooting. As police collected against him, they learned the suspect had fled the country, likely to Somalia, and the case went cold.
In 2022, court documents say, a tipster contacted police and told them Abdulkadir Ali had contacted her on the day of the murder and said he needed money to flee the country. The woman said he admitted to killing Haji-Ahmed and needed to flee because he had been caught on video at the gas station.
Homicide detectives learned in March of 2024 that Abdulkadir Ali was back in the U.S. and living in Fargo. They obtained a warrant to obtain his DNA and collected a sample to compare with the piece of jacket found at the murder scene. Tests reportedly show the defendant is among just .6% of the world's population who could be a potential match.
Suleiman Abdulkadir Ali will appear in Hennepin County District Court on charges of second-degree murder on May 16.
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