Second suspect arrested in attack on Jewish students at Columbia University who were pelted with stones: police

metro

From Amanda Woods

A second suspect was arrested Thursday morning in connection with the hate-filled attack on a Jewish Columbia University student. The student was pelted with stones and had his Israeli flag burned during unrest on campus in April, authorities said.

Zuhdi Ahmed, 20, of Ossining, was arrested shortly after 6 a.m. and charged with several charges – assault and threatening as a hate crime, as well as aggravated harassment, illegal possession of a weapon and harassment – in connection with the April 20 crime targeting student Jonathan Lederer, 22, police said.

Ahmed was allegedly part of a trio that confronted Lederer shortly before 10 p.m. at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and West 116th Street, with one of them ripping away the Israeli flag from him, police said.

The victim followed the flag robber, who fled into a crowd with the victim on his heels when another person threw a stone at him and hit him in the face, police said.

A third person then stole the flag and set it on fire, police said.

“I eventually managed to grab my flags and run to my friends,” Lederer wrote in an article he wrote for The Free Press. “We were eventually chased off campus and told to ‘go back to Poland,’ a poignant reminder that even in America, anti-Semites want to condemn Jews like me to the tragic fate of our ancestors.”

The victim refused medical treatment for minor injuries.

Lederer wrote that before the violence broke out, he and his friends sang songs calling for peace.

“Amid numerous protests inside and outside the gates of Columbia, my friends and I decided to once again show our pride, as we have done on so many occasions since the beginning of Hamas’ war,” he said.

They then came face to face with the “masked Kufiya wearers” and tried to “intimidate” them, he wrote.

“They chanted, ‘Fuck Israel, Israel is a bitch,'” he wrote. “We were told, ‘You are all victims of inbreeding.'”

Ahmed’s exact role in the attack is unclear.

He said nothing as he was led out of the NYPD’s 7th Precinct, which houses the department’s Hate Crime Task Force, wearing a black sweatshirt with “Montauk” emblazoned in white and blue jeans.

James Carlson, 41, has already been handcuffed in connection with the May 1 hate attack and charged with criminal damage, arson and illegal possession of stolen property, police said.

Carlson, who also goes by the names Cody Carlson or Cody Tarlow, is “a longtime anarchist,” a senior police source said last month.

The provocateur, whose arrests date back to 2005, is one of three children of the well-known advertising executive Richard “Dick” Tarlow and his wife Sandy Carlson Tarlow.

Dick Tarlow died in 2022 at the age of 81. His fortune was worth at least $20 million, according to court records.

Sandy Carlson Tarlow, who died in 2003 at the age of 59, was known for shaping the “public face of Ralph Lauren,” according to her obituary.

A third suspect in the anti-Semitic attack is still at large.