NEW YORK – The killer, dressed all in black and wearing a black mask, followed the young tech entrepreneur from the elevator of his luxury condo to his apartment.
He then used an electric pistol to immobilize the businessman, Fahim Saleh, detectives believe.
Some time later, the assailant killed Saleh, beheaded him, and dismembered his body with an electric saw.
The investigation was in its early stages, but that was the chilling account that a law enforcement official reported on the investigation Wednesday as detectives continued to examine evidence of the shocking 33-year-old Saleh murder. His body parts were found Tuesday in plastic garbage bags in his apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
On Wednesday, police continued their investigation into the building and inside the Saleh apartment, a seventh-floor unit that it purchased last year for $ 2.25 million, public records show, and for which it expressed its affection on Instagram.
The investigation included a review of surveillance video of the Saleh apartment building and an interview with his sister.
Investigators believe the work of the murderer who dismembered the body was interrupted when the victim’s sister entered the department to check it after not hearing from him for a day, another police official said.
Detectives think the assailant fled through the back door of the apartment and reached the staircase of the building when she arrived, the official said.
A Police Department spokesman said he could not comment on how the killer entered the building. The property management company said the building had no doorman, but had extensive security.
The management company, in a statement, said Saleh was an active member of the condo’s board.
“The unit owners, residents, the board and the administration are very upset,” the statement said.
On Tuesday, a police officer said the electric saw was still connected to an electrical outlet when police arrived, and that the killer had left some cleaning supplies. It seemed that some effort had been made to clean up the evidence.
The official who spoke Wednesday said the murder “looks like a professional job,” referring to it as a “hit.” A police department spokesman said he was unable to comment on a possible motive or if a suspect had been identified.
On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, detectives scoured the neighborhood for surveillance video from outside local stores, residential and commercial buildings, and traffic cameras in the area to see if cameras had captured the killer entering or leaving or waiting for their prey, several law enforcement officials said. .
The creepy death has attracted international attention given Saleh’s global connections. The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, Saleh founded transportation companies in Bangladesh and Nigeria, as well as a Manhattan-based venture capital fund that heavily invested in companies in the developing world.
On Wednesday, Bangladesh’s information and communication technology minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak expressed his condolences and said on Twitter that Saleh’s death was a great loss to the country.
Saleh’s family declined to speak to the press.
Sumeet Rametra, who met Saleh at university and has been in close communication with his family since his death, described his friend as someone who indulged in kind gestures, such as buying his parents a house and a Tesla.
Saleh once asked Rametra to join him for a game of tennis, but Rametra said he did not have a racket, he recalled.
“He said, ‘I already got you one, let’s go,'” Rametra said, crying. “I could never play with him.”
Rametra, 31, also praised Saleh’s business acumen, saying his friend was a visionary who was always searching for his next idea.
“It was a machine, buddy, it never stopped,” said Rametra. “I was always trying to make money.”
Saleh grew up near Poughkeepsie, New York, according to public records. As a teenager, she learned to code and began developing websites, her friends said. She graduated from Bentley University, a small university in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 2009 with a degree in computer information systems, according to her LinkedIn profile.
On social media, in interviews and blog posts, Saleh described himself as an entrepreneur driven by passion.
“Entrepreneurs are the ones who really change countries, who really change cities,” Saleh said in a YouTube video in February. “They are the ones who bring the vision.”
After college Saleh turned her love for practical jokes into a prank app called PrankDial, which allowed users to buy prerecorded calls to send to their friends.
Writing years later about the business, Saleh said it eventually generated millions and led him to realize that he could continue to turn his passions, in this case, by practical jokes, into big money.
“If you go into a project totally focused on making money, you will be disappointed,” he wrote in a Medium post.
Still, PrankDial had its stumbles. On his LinkedIn profile, Saleh boasted that while his company had millions of downloads, it also attracted more than 100 citations.
At the time of Saleh’s death, PrankDial and its owners faced an active lawsuit from a New Jersey jail worker who was convicted in 2015 of using the site to illegally intercept his coworkers.
After PrankDial, Saleh turned his attention to Bangladesh, where he co-founded the Pathao ridesharing company in 2015. The business, which Saleh left in 2018, started as a bike-sharing company, but now offers transportation, delivery and commercial logistics.
“Fahim believed in the potential of technology to transform lives in Bangladesh and beyond,” Pathao said in a statement.
Driven by his success in Bangladesh, Saleh attempted to launch a similar company in Nigeria. That company, Gokada, started operating as a motorcycle transport company in Lagos, Nigeria’s most populous city, in 2018.
Motorcycle taxis, called okada in Nigeria, have been popular in Lagos and in many other African cities as a way to get around traffic jams. Gokada raised $ 5.3 million in venture capital in June 2019, according to the TechCrunch website.
But Saleh’s business hit a major stumbling block in February, when state officials banned motorcycle taxis from operating in Lagos’ main commercial and residential areas.
Gokada was forced to stop his transportation business. In a video about the ban, Saleh, the company’s chief executive, looked dejected.
“This has definitely been a heavy blow,” Saleh said in the video, which he posted on YouTube and on social media platforms on February 2 and titled “Gokada is not okay.”
Saleh was forced to fire workers, his friends said. But he tried to recover, saying he still believed that Nigeria had enormous economic potential and that it could provide jobs for young Nigerians.
In February, Gokada quickly turned to a package and food delivery service. After the change, Saleh sounded an optimistic note.
In April, when the pandemic overturned New York and Nigeria alike, he noted on Twitter that his company was well positioned to adapt to economic change.
“Now it looks like we had a two-month lead in one of the few thriving business sectors,” he said.
The police official said investigators were exploring Wednesday whether Saleh’s murder could be related to his business, pointing to indications that his company had been suffering.
Even when his startup encountered setbacks, Saleh had remained hopeful and persistent.
“I have a very good feeling about 2020,” he said on Twitter on June 2.
Get email alerts from Boston.com:
Sign up to receive coronavirus news and breaking updates, from our newsroom to your inbox.
