A day after a GI who had been serving in Iraq buried his wife and mother-in-law, cops busted a 14-year-old Bronx boy for allegedly setting the fire that killed them, police sources said.
Cops charged Hasan Zobaer Mohammed, of Doris Street, with two counts of murder, one of arson and one of reckless endangerment in the blaze that killed Roberto Cruz's 21-year-old wife, Maria, as well as her mother, Brenda Casanova, 41, on Dec. 30. Three people were injured.
Mohammed, who was charged as an adult, told cops he set the blaze to kill himself, police sources said.
He claimed he got the idea after hearing that someone on Thanksgiving soaked the carpet outside of Cruz and Casanova's Glover Street apartment in gasoline. No one was ever charged in that crime.
But he ran from the scene when flames began burning him, sources said.
Itzel Casanova, Maria's 19-year-old sister, told WINS radio she hopes the suspect dies in jail, adding, "I want him to suffer the way I'm suffering."
Cruz, a member of the 101st Airborne, had been given emergency leave to come home to The Bronx.
"We are really sorry that this incident happened that two are dead," said the suspect's father, Mohammed Abdul Karim, a phone maintenance worker said.
Mohammed, the oldest of five children, felt abandoned by friends after he was accused of stealing $100 from a local mosque and grew increasingly downcast, said Karim.
His son thought, "I am not free among my friends. I am undermined by stealing," Karim said.
Mohammed, who immigrated with his family from Bangladesh, went to a private Islamic school where he studied the Koran.
The suspect didn't know the people he killed and, and only sought to end his own life, Karim insisted, "but the fire was too out of control."
"He could not imagine that two people died," his father said.
