Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg passionately denounced an Arizona prosecutor on Thursday for refusing to extradite a man accused of killing a Queens woman earlier this month, and pleaded the Maricopa County official to handle the spat through a rational, professional “phone call.”
“It is deeply disturbing to me that a member of law enforcement would choose to play political games in a murder case,” Bragg said at a news conference on Thursday. “That should have no place in our profession.”
The unusual interstate spat comes as New York City has taken center stage in a fractious national debate over migrants and federal border policy. Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, a Republican, has refused to extradite a man suspected of killing a woman in a SoHo hotel after he was arrested in Arizona in relation to the case on Feb. 18.
Mitchell said she didn’t trust Bragg to keep the suspect behind bars.
On Tuesday, NYPD officials accused Raad Almansoori, 26, of killing Denisse Oleas-Arancibia, 38 and originally from Ecuador, who was found dead on the floor of a room at the SoHo 54 Hotel with a clothes iron near her body earlier this month.
Police later alleged that Almansoori used the broken iron to kill Oleas-Arancibia by slamming it into her head and leaving bits of plastic embedded in her skull, according to NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny.
Almansoori flew from Newark Airport to Arizona on Feb. 12 and was eventually arrested in Scottsdale 10 days later after stabbing two other women, NYPD officials said.
Gothamist could not reach Almansoori’s family. Information for his attorney was not immediately available.
Almansoori’s extradition to New York City would have been routine — it’s not uncommon for suspects arrested in other states to be transported back to face charges for serious crimes, according to former prosecutors. And Almansoori faces a much more serious charge in New York than he does in Arizona.
Bragg argued that Mitchell was…
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