A Queens man confessed Tuesday to a frightening New Year’s Day firebombing spree — claiming a personal vendetta drove him to tossing the Molotov cocktails, police said.
Ray Lazier Lengend, 40, appeared dazed and mumbled incoherently as he was led out of the 103rd Precinct stationhouse and into an ambulance Tuesday night.
Lengend, an unemployed truck driver, was charged with five counts of criminal possession of a weapon and five counts of arson, one considered a hate crime, police said.
He made “broad anti-Muslim statements” to detectives and said each of the five attacks in Queens and Elmont, L.I., stemmed from ongoing beefs. He tried to torch a Jamaica mosque because he wasn’t allowed to use its bathroom.
“The suspect made statements incriminating himself in each of the five firebombings, citing a personal grievance or dispute in each instance,” said Paul Browne, top spokesman for the NYPD.
Investigators were also trying to link him to at least three other attacks reported after the suspect’s arrest, Browne said.
Lengend was cuffed about 8 a.m. on Tuesday, after Detectives Richard Johnson and Charles LoPresti of the 103rd Precinct saw him get into a stolen car linked to the first attack, on a Hillside Ave., Queens, bodega.
Lengend was caught by workers at the bodega on Dec. 27 trying to steal a carton of milk and a Starbucks Frappuccino.
“When they were pushing him out of the store, he said words to the effect of, ‘We’re going to get even; we’re going to get back at you,’ ” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told reporters.
Lengend — who has several prior arrests for crack possession and larceny — filled a Starbucks bottle with an accelerant before lighting it and tossing it at the bodega about 8 p.m. on Sunday, sources said.
He then cruised over to 107th Ave. to set fire to a crack dealer’s house, but he torched the wrong address, sources said.
At 8:44 p.m., the suspect hurled two of his homemade firebombs at the Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center on the Van Wyck Expressway, cops said.
During his confession, Lengend said he targeted the mosque because it refused let him use the bathroom in the past. He also said he had intended to throw three more Molotov cocktails at the mosque before he drove away but didn’t carry out his plan, an official said.
Lengend then took a trip to Elmont, where he threw a bottle bomb at an in-law’s house, sources said. His spree ended at 10:14 p.m., when he tossed a Molotov cocktail at a 170th St. home that doubles as a Hindu place of worship.
Police sources said that Lengend gave detectives a nickname for a person who crossed him about five years ago that he believed lived in the house. The last attack was not being probed as a hate crime.
Suspect Arrested in Queens and Nassau Firebombings: MyFoxNY.com
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