Aiexpress – A 26-year-old man accused of bludgeoning a woman to death in a Manhattan hotel room earlier this month has been detained in Arizona, where he is accused of attacking two more women, authorities said, raising concerns that he may have more victims.
On February 8, staff members at the SoHo 54 Hotel in Manhattan found the body of 38-year-old Denisse Oleas-Arancibia in her room. Raad Almansoori is under suspicion of murder.
Police were looking for him until he was captured Sunday in Arizona while driving a stolen automobile. He is accused of stabbing a McDonald’s employee in the restaurant’s bathroom and carjacking another woman at knifepoint.
Authorities in New York City urged people nationwide on Tuesday to notify law enforcement if they saw Almansoori in their neighborhoods so that authorities might investigate potential connections to future attacks.
“Anywhere that he’s visited there’s potential that there are other victims around the country,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Tarik Sheppard told reporters Tuesday during a press conference , “and we want to do our due diligence and make sure that we let communities around the country know that they should be aware of who this person is.”
According to Joseph Kenny, Chief of Detectives for the New York Police Department, he is suspected of killing Oleas-Arancibia, who he described as an escort, between 2:14 p.m. on Feb. 7 and 10:30 a.m. on Feb. 8, when hotel staff found her dead on the floor of her room.
A broken iron was found in the room, and pieces of plastic were taken out of her skull, he said. The cause of death was blunt-force injuries to the head.
“Their investigation showed that Almansoori and Oleas-Arancibia had a disagreement about how long he could stay in her hotel room before she was killed,” Kenny said.
A few days later, he is thought to have flown from New York to Arizona, where he is accused of trying to rob a woman’s car on Saturday and getting away from the scene. Authorities say the lady is recovering at a nearby hospital after being taken there.
The next day, around 8:30 a.m., cops in Surprise, Arizona, which is northwest of Phoneix, were called to a McDonald’s near West Greenway and North Reems Roads to find a woman who had been stabbed several times.
The woman worked at the fast food place, according to Kenny, and she was dragged into the woman’s bathroom and stabbed several times.
Almansoori was later caught in Scottsdale driving a stolen car, according to a statement from the Surprise Police Department.
Almansoori told cops in Arizona that he was wanted for murder in New York City, Kenny told reporters.
Kenny informed the police that Almansoori had mentioned the “Google SoHo 54 Hotel.”
According to Kenny, the suspect admitted to authorities in Arizona that he had harmed three more girls in Florida.
Even though Almansoori has never been arrested in New York, he has a “extensive” criminal record from other states, according to Kenny. He said that Almansoori’s latest string of crimes happened while he was out on bail since September after being arrested in Florida on charges of kidnapping and sexual assault of an escort.
Almansoori is currently in custody at Maricopa County due to a range of charges, including theft, robbery, and homicide, as stated in jail records.
The Surprise police department will hold a press conference regarding the case on Wednesday at 10 a.m.
