Mahfuz Huq was arrested in India last year, extradited.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A crime of passion, a cold case – call it what you want, but now police and the victim’s family are calling it something else: closed.
An Indiana murder, dating all the way back to August 9, 1989, finally ended with the jailing of a Bangladeshi man named Mahfuz Huq, 47, last month. The case was just a few months short of 25 years old when it finally closed, and took one police detective nearly eight years of digging up old files, talking to witnesses, and liaising with two foreign governments before finally nabbing the murderer.
The story begins in the months leading up to the date of the murder, when Huq was dating Christine Mutzfeld. That relationship eventually broke off, something which Huq never fully reconciled with, as he vowed to win her back. Shortly after the dissolution of the relationship, Huq heard through the grapevine that Mutzfeld was getting friendly with a boy named Tod Kelley, and that the two may become an item.
According to testimony and court documents, Huq would even tell people openly that he was willing to kill anyone who made a pass at Mutzfeld. Despite these warnings, Kelley and Mutzfeld surreptitiously kept their budding romance going, one that would ultimately end in tragedy.
On the night of August 9, Huq allegedly heard the two lovers having relations at Kelley’s house, and waited until Kelley was alone in his bedroom before stabbing him multiple times. Huq then made efforts to clean up the crime scene and hide Kelley’s body, before suddenly disappearing without a trace.
From the outset, Kelley’s family knew that Huq had to be involved, not only for his public declarations against anyone who had relations with Mutzfeld, but also because of the fact that he vanished almost immediately after Kelley was found murdered. With no way of finding Huq and definitively determining his culpability, the case eventually withered away, becoming a cold case that even got national attention on popular crime television shows as the family sought any means necessary to bring Huq to justice.
For over a decade, the case lay dormant, with nothing of incidence occurring at all. Then, in 2005, Steuben County Detective Todd Smith dug up the case, and began investigating old leads to see if he could find anything new, according to The Herald Republic.
Almost immediately, Smith figured that Huq must have gone back to Bangladesh, which investigators in 1989 had also assumed – they just lacked the proper resources to truly chase that lead. For four years, Smith doggedly sought help from the Bangladesh diplomatic corps in the US, hoping to establish some kind of relationship that would lead to the identification of Huq. Eventually, in 2009, Smith made contact with a Defense Security Services (DSS) agent, David Koczot, who was able to locate relatives of Huq in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh.
Koczot subsequently established contact with the US Embassy there, showing Huq’s photograph (from 1989) to workers at the Embassy in the hopes that someone could recognize this one man out of over 14 million of the city’s residents.
To his surprise, they did. Huq had become Asif Haque, a math and tennis teacher at a local middle school where many of the diplomats’ children attended classes. An eight month-long investigation commenced, in which all information of Huq/Haque was compiled in order to build a credible case for his arrest.
When word got to US law enforcement that Huq would be travelling to New Delhi for a tennis tournament in which he was coaching, Smith and company rang up the law enforcement in the Indian capital, who eventually agreed to issue a pre-emptive arrest warrant for Huq that would allow him to be seized as soon as he entered the country. In mid-July of last year, Huq was arrested, and then extradited back to the US
In November 2013, Huq pled guilty to the charges, expressing his remorse for the crime and asking the Kelley family to forgive him. Huq admitted culpability but said the intervening years had caused his memory to fade, and that he had little to offer with regards to the details of Kelley’s slaying.
As part of a plea agreement, Huq was sentenced last month to 40 years behind bars, which was further mitigated to 17 years after factoring time served and other elements. The 47 year-old Huq is now behind bars for a crime committed when he was just 22.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com