The suspect being questioned was arrested on charges related to a hit-and-run traffic accident on the day of the murders, police said at a briefing.
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Akonjee had been carrying more than $1,000, but the attacker did not take the money, police said.
Authorities have not said what prompted the daytime shooting of Imam Maulana Alauddin Akonjee and Thara Uddin.
NY police “must not engage in giving mixed messages”, said one speaker, alleging that such messages create anger in the community.
Detectives checked a police database and found that a auto with a matching description of the one that left the shooting had been involved in a hit-and-run crash in Brooklyn, said Stephen Davis, the New York Police Department’s top spokesman.
“While we do not yet know the motivation for the murders of Maulama Akonjee and Thara Uddin, we do know that our Muslim communities are in the perpetual crosshairs of bigotry”, the mayor said.
The ceremony featured several speakers who said they believed the victims were targeted due to their religion.
“We want justice”, Badrul Kahn, founder of the Al-Furqan mosque and its chief adviser, shouted to the crowd in the service’s opening speech. Police officials are also still in the midst of identifying the suspect.
NY mayor Bill de Blasio has said Muslim communities in NY are “in the perpetual crosshairs of bigotry” and vowed that the killer will be brought to justice.
Emotions ran high. Some people shouted for justice as a man spoke at the podium.
New York City police detectives investigating the slayings of an imam and his associate have detained and questioned a man as part of an attempt to identify a vehicle seen after the shooting.
Surveillance video obtained by BuzzFeed News showed a person approaching the two from behind as they walked down a city street Saturday.
Investigators said Monday that the vehicle matched the description of one involved in an unsolved hit-and-run crash in Brooklyn.
Investigators were questioning the suspect taken into custody late Sunday night, and were pursuing the possibility the killing may have been a deranged escalation of a recent dispute over parking, according to sources.
The two victims, aged 55 and 65, were gunned down by what police are saying appears to have been an experienced hit man just moments came just moments after prayers concluded at the Al-Furqan Jame Mosque in Liberty Avenue on Saturday afternoon.
Akonjee’s son, Foyez Uddin, who isn’t related to the other victim, tells The Associated Press in Bangladesh that his father and mother had booked flights for August 31 to visit the elder man’s mother.
This, as family and friends prepare to say goodbye to the victims at their funeral today. He said they “cannot believe he is no more”, call the loss “irreparable”.
The brazen daylight shooting happened in a Bangladeshi community of Queens.
CAIR offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the shooter.
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Khan, who spoke at the funeral for the two men in Ozone Park on Monday, told Reuters that the imam was a man of simple routines who lived and breathed his religious faith.
