Last of three parts. Detectives working to solve a murder mystery soon learned that the victim, Mary Zaman, had been assaulted before by her husband, Iqbal Ahmed, and their attention quickly turned to him.

By Joshua Freed, Associated Press Writer

The ringing phone jolted Farzana Sharmin awake around 11:30 a.m. She was still sleeping, from working at the restaurant the night before. Her mother said she should get over to her friend Mary’s apartment right away.

She found Mary Zaman and her husband, Iqbal, sitting between two beds, crying. Mary later told police that she had tried to leave the apartment, but Iqbal locked her in a bathroom, and strangled her with her underwear until she was unconscious. That morning, she showed Farzana where she had bitten her tongue.

Iqbal never contradicted that, Farzana said.

&uot;She wants to leave, and I’m not going to let her leave,&uot; she remembers him saying.

What he said next chilled Farzana, because it was exactly what Mary had told her Iqbal had said before: &uot;I’ll kill her before I let her go.&uot;

&uot;My wife is not divorcing me,&uot; he said. &uot;I’ll kill her and I’ll take my kid.&uot;

Farzana convinced Iqbal to let her take Mary. As soon as they got on the elevator, Mary turned to Farzana. &uot;I want to go to the police.&uot;

Later that day &045; March 6, 1998 &045; police arrested Iqbal. Prosecutors charged him with attempted second-degree murder and false imprisonment.

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Mary liked to look good.

The 27-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant used lentil paste to smooth her complexion. In the cramped New York apartment bedroom she shared with her husband, son and another Bangladeshi couple, she used the narrow space between two beds to do sit-ups to keep her figure. There was no other place to exercise.

She met Iqbal at the University of Dhaka, where he tutored her. She later told Farzana that Iqbal &045; a salesman for a company that printed greeting cards and calendars &045; wrote her repeatedly, pursuing her, finally convincing her to marry him.

They came to New York with their son, Asif, then 2 or 3, in 1996 on 11-week visitor’s visas. Mary met Farzana because Farzana’s mother shared Mary’s apartment. They quickly became close, waitressing at the same Indian restaurant and sharing clothes. Farzana thought of Mary as an older sister.

Mary had told Farzana that she wanted out of the marriage. Iqbal wouldn’t let her go to school. He wouldn’t let her go out, unless it was with Farzana or another female friend. Mary claimed she was sleeping around &045; with the restaurant owner, with the bag boy from the Mexican grocery below their apartment &045; to try to force Iqbal to divorce her. She even said she feared that Iqbal would kill her if she tried to leave. But as bad as the marriage was, Farzana said, she never saw anything violent until the day Mary accused her husband of assaulting her.

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After filing the police report, Mary spent three nights at the Pan American Hotel in Queens. But she got little support. The restaurant owner, who paid for two nights at the hotel, told her she belonged with Iqbal because he was the father of her son.

At the district attorney’s office, Mary said she planned to go back to her husband. With Farzana looking on, the police officer who had taken her statement told Mary, &uot;You know what’s going to happen? He’s going to kill you.&uot;

&uot;I want my husband back,&uot; Mary told him. &uot;I want my life back. I want my family back.&uot;

Farzana jumped in, and their conversation flew back-and-forth between rapid-fire Bengali and English.

&uot;You don’t have a kid. You don’t have a husband. You will never understand,&uot; Mary said. &uot;In America, divorce is OK. It’s accepted. Not in my culture. My kid will go without a father.&uot;

With Mary no longer cooperating, prosecutors allowed Iqbal to plead guilty to a lesser charge. The case file was sealed, and Iqbal’s booking photos and fingerprints were destroyed.

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Brad Nelson and Kent Perlich sat at a table at the India Garden restaurant, across from owner Mohammed Miah. They had already heard enough to to be hopeful that they were closing in on the identities &045; and maybe the killer &045; of the headless woman and child found in a ditch just north of Rochester.

Miah’s restaurant on Rochester’s Broadway was one of the few Indian restaurants in town. Miah and most of his employees are Bangladeshi, but Indian food sells better. The restaurant draws a mix of overall-wearing contractors and Mayo Clinic doctors. Prints of North American whitetail deer hang above a lunch buffet that includes Indian food cooked to American tastes.

Nelson already knew that Mary Zaman, who came to the U.S. in 1996 on an 11-week visitor’s visa and never left, had worked there off the books, sharing a paycheck with her husband, Iqbal Ahmed.

Miah told them that he had hired Iqbal when the Bangladeshi immigrant answered an ad in a Bengali-language newspaper in New York. Iqbal brought his wife, Mary, and son Asif to Rochester in the summer of 1998. Iqbal became a waiter and manager, Mary worked as a waitress.

And then, in September 1999, the usually reliable Mary hadn’t shown up for her Sunday night dinner shift. Iqbal had called to say that she had left him, had gotten mixed up with another man, and that he was going to New York to bring her home. He later called Miah to ask if he had seen Mary, because Iqbal couldn’t find her in New York.

Nelson, Det. Dave Rikhus and other investigators quickly pulled Iqbal’s bank and credit card records in the weeks leading up to the killings, which detectives came to believe happened on Sept. 19, 1999, a Sunday:

&045;On Aug. 25, Iqbal bought airline tickets from Minneapolis to New York. A few weeks later he bought tickets from New York to Bangladesh.

&045;On Sept. 5, he bought an axe and 12 extra-heavy duty contractor’s garbage bags at a Hardware Hank store.

&045;On the Friday before the killings, he cashed two bad checks for $950 each. One of those checks was drawn on an account that had just $7.

&045;The day after the killings, Iqbal flew to New York. He had bought a ticket for a child, too, but it wasn’t clear whether that had been used. He spent two days shopping, then flew out of New York for Bangladesh on Biman Bangladesh Airlines.

Iqbal’s travel and Mary’s disappearance led police to think he was a good suspect. But they could have been coincidences. Iqbal had made the call to India Garden saying he was following Mary to New York, and, for all Nelson knew, it might be true.

The uncertainty was tough on Nelson and the other officers. Nelson often lay awake at night trying to think of new angles to try. His wife sometimes found him on the couch in the morning. He had moved there so his tossing and turning wouldn’t wake her up.

Detectives needed something to tie Iqbal directly to the killings. They got it in one of the most basic clues &045; a fingerprint.

A print left on the inside of one of the trash bags hadn’t matched any criminals in national databases.

But Detective Rikhus kept working the phones to New York, and on July 20, 2000, it paid off. While New York prosecutors no longer cared about Iqbal’s fingerprints, the city’s taxi cab licensers did. Iqbal was fingerprinted when he applied to be a cab driver &045; and his fingerprint matched the one found on the inside of the garbage bag.

The next day, the Immigration and Naturalization Service told Nelson that Iqbal had tried to enter the country in early June. But the INS, unaware that he was a suspect, turned down his request for a visitor’s visa because his travel plans weren’t specific enough.

Three days later, Iqbal was charged with second-degree murder for the killings of his wife and son. The charge was sealed; detectives hoped Iqbal might be lured back to the U.S. This time the INS promised to let him in.

For the next 3 1/2 months, investigators waited while federal agents tried to lure Iqbal back to the U.S. One possibility that was discussed was telling Iqbal that his visa application had been reconsidered, and he was free to return to the U.S. It’s unclear whether this was actually tried, and federal agents who worked on the case won’t talk about this aspect of it.

Detectives had another surprise waiting for them.

On Dec. 7, 2000, detectives got a call from the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York. They were detaining a man named Mohammed Tareq, who had arrived on a flight into New York. Rochester detectives had asked that Tareq be held because they knew he was Mary’s brother-in-law. His wife, Sophia, had lived with Mary in Rochester. She has not been heard from since September 1999, the same time Mary and the boy disappeared.

Tareq said he was looking for his wife and son. Without a U.S. entry visa, he was sent back to Bangladesh.

But before he left, authorities grabbed photos of him and his family from his suitcase. When the photo arrived in Rochester, detectives passed it around the room at one of their weekly meetings. Capt. Mike Lawler noticed that the shorts worn by Tareq’s son looked the same as the shorts worn by the dead child &045; right down to the red and green buttons.

Detectives were stunned. The boy from the ditch wasn’t Mary Zaman’s son, but Tareq’s.

On Dec. 20, an FBI agent based in New Delhi traveled to Bangladesh and found Iqbal. The agent couldn’t arrest Iqbal because the U.S. has no extradition treaty with Bangladesh. But Iqbal did allow his son, Asif, to provide a DNA sample that verified the boy’s identity. A different DNA sample proved the woman in the ditch was his mother, Mary Zaman, and the boy in the ditch was Taef, the son of Mohammed and Sophia Tareq.

Authorities have not found Sophia’s body, but they believe she is dead.

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As long as Iqbal stays in Bangladesh, he stays free. Nelson has worked with federal authorities to get Iqbal’s name on watch lists at immigration ports around the world. Every now and then, those nets snare someone else named Iqbal Ahmed, and after authorities confirm that he is not their Rochester murder suspect, he is released.

Chances for an extradition treaty with Bangladesh are considered slim, especially after the U.S. response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks made majority-Muslim countries like Bangladesh wary of U.S. law enforcement.

In the village of Rahmatpur, Iqbal goes by the name Bulbul Mollah, and his son, Asif, is called Subha Mollah. Iqbal told neighbors that he left his wife in the U.S. because she is a woman of bad character and she had affairs with Americans; Iqbal says he fled the U.S. because his wife’s lovers threatened to kill him.

Iqbal lost a race for a local council seat in February. He re-married last year, and has a reputation for having a bad temper.

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(Joshua Freed can be reached at jfreed@ap.org.)