Rico's rants: Fire bugs, east and west

Corey Kilgannon and Noah Rosenberg have an article in The New York Times about a firebombing in Queens:

It was around 10 p.m. on Sunday when a man in a hooded sweatshirt drove up to a home on 170th Street in Jamaica, Queens, and stepped out holding a glass bottle. Slowly and deliberately, the man threw the bottle— transformed into a Molotov cocktail by the addition of flammable liquid and a wick— toward the bay window of the home, which houses a small Hindu temple.
Ramesh Maharaj, 62, a Hindu priest who lives in the house, rushed from his bed to the lawn and found the bottle burning harmlessly. “It smelled like kerosene,” said Maharaj. “The intention from the behavior of the guy was to do destruction.”
The New York police say this small temple was one of four sites firebombed in Jamaica on Sunday night. No injuries were reported. Assisted by federal and state authorities, the police are investigating the firebombings as possible bias attacks. A security camera captured the attack on the temple. In three of the four attacks, Starbucks Frappucino bottles were used, the police and witnesses said.
One attack occurred at an Islamic center where about a hundred people were worshiping, and another at a bodega owned by a Muslim immigrant from Yemen. At the fourth site, a house on 107th Avenue, the residents said that they were Christians and that they were baffled by the attack.
In a fifth episode on Sunday night, a bottle containing flammable liquid was thrown onto the porch of a house in Elmont, just across the Nassau County border. The case had “some characteristics” of the pattern in Queens, a spokesman for the Nassau County police said.
No arrests were made as of Monday night. The police released a sketch of a suspect, describing him as a black man 25 to 30 years old, 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighing two hundred pounds and wearing a black jacket and a baseball cap. He was seen driving a light-color sedan.
The Queens attacks occurred in one of the more diverse stretches of the city’s most diverse borough. Jamaica Avenue and Hillside Avenue, two main thoroughfares, are dotted with halal shops, Latino restaurants, Hindu temples, and storefront Christian churches. Once predominantly black, the neighborhood has had influxes of immigrants from many parts of the world, including Guyana, the West Indies, Central America, South Asia, and Arabic-speaking lands.
“Everyone gets along, no problems,” said Salem Ahmed, 38, the owner of the bodega, on Hillside Avenue and 180th Street, that was firebombed about 8 p.m. Ahmed said a man ran into the store and threw a flaming bottle over the deli counter at the small 24-hour grocery store, which he opened soon after arriving from Yemen twenty years ago. The bottle fell to the floor without breaking and caused a small fire easily extinguished by a worker, he said. He said his first thought was about a man whom workers threw out for shoplifting. “But I don’t think it’s him,” he said.
In the attack on the al-Khoei Islamic Center, along the Van Wyck Expressway, two flaming bottles were thrown at the entrance, causing a small fire shortly before 9 p.m.
Imam Maan al-Sahlani, an Iraqi immigrant, said a service had just ended when the attack took place. There was little damage, he said, but the attack caused concern among some members that Muslims might have been targeted “You really can’t accuse one religion or a party without knowing more about it,” he said. He said that the center, which opened in 1989, had had no disputes with anyone. It serves a diverse membership with services held in English, Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Its leaders are mostly Iraqi immigrants, and its members are mostly Lebanese.
The imam said he had heard about the attack on the Hindu temple, and added: “Some people confuse Hindus and Muslims.” The police had promised protection for the Islamic center, and the stepped-up security had reassured its members. “We’re trying to convince them that everything’s fine,” he said.
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo asked the State Police to help with the investigation, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said: “No matter what the motivation was of the individual who threw Molotov cocktails in Queens last night, his actions stand in stark contrast to the New York City of today that we’ve built together.”
In Elmont, Bejai Rai and his wife were getting ready for bed in their home on Glafil Street around 9:40 when they heard a loud crash, Rai said, “as if the chandelier had fallen down.” One of their sons watched as a man rushed away and into a late model two-door car, either champagne or silver in color.
Rai said it appeared that the bottle had bounced off the house and crashed on the concrete walkway without setting anything afire. “We are terribly nervous,” said Rai, a Hindu from Guyana. “If they’re going to bomb a house, to burn a house down, they want to kill us. Why would someone want to do that to us?”
Maharaj, who operates the Hindu temple, said Monday that he had not slept, but that he would conduct his usual prayer service Monday night.
The firebomber was seen on a security camera installed after a break-in last March. The attacker, Maharaj said, “should try to find God and be remorseful for what he has done."

Adam Nagourney has an article in The New York Times about firebombings in Los Angeles:

A four-day storm of arsons that caused more than three million dollars in damage to cars and apartment buildings across Los Angeles led to an arrest early Monday morning after a reserve sheriff’s deputy, on patrol in the midst of another chaotic night of serial fires, recognized a man from a video surveillance tape released this week. The man, Harry Burkhart, 24, was taken into custody without incident around 3 a.m. on Sunset Boulevard on the outskirts of Hollywood, close to a drug store and a gas station. He was charged with arson around 6 a.m., and was being held without bail.
“A serial arsonist has, I believe, been caught,” Sheriff Lee Baca of Los Angeles County, standing in front of a bank of television cameras, said at a news conference attended by a parade of elected officials. Sheriff Baca called the suspect “perhaps the most dangerous arsonist in the county of Los Angeles that I can recall.”
Chief Charlie Beck of the Los Angeles Police Department said Burkhart was a German national; few additional details about the case would be provided for now, he added.
Chief Beck said he hoped that the suspect was acting alone, but he refused to rule out the possibility of other people being involved. “That is our huge concern at this exact moment,” Chief Beck said. “We have every hope that he did. But we do not know that yet.”
Search warrants were being executed at Burkhart’s house, Chief Beck said, and information from those searches would help officials determine how many people were involved in setting the fires.
Still other officials, including Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, seemed more optimistic that this arrest would resolve the case. And they said that there had been no more fires after Burkhart, who was driving a van that contained some incendiary material, was taken into custody.
The arrest brought at least a temporary reprieve in an episode that dominated the New Year’s weekend here. The attacks began early Friday morning and continued the next three nights. In the end, 52 cars were set on fire. Since many of the cars were in carports or garages, a number of apartment buildings sustained serious damage as well.
The random attacks stirred anxiety in neighborhoods across the city. But there were no significant injuries in connection with the fires, the authorities said.
Burkhart’s arrest came after another chaotic night, as cars began exploding into flames after dusk. The streets were again flooded with police officers, detectives and fire investigators.
Chief Beck said the case would not have been solved without the release on Sunday of a videotape showing the suspect leaving a parking lot. Shervin Lalezary, a reserve sheriff’s deputy who works for a dollar a year, spotted the suspect and stopped him at Sunset Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. He was introduced to considerable applause at the news conference on Monday evening as he described the stop. “As soon as I put on my lights and initiated a traffic stop of the suspect vehicle, I had an LAPD vehicle behind me ready to go,” he said.
For the next two hours, the area was roped off and police helicopters rumbled overhead.
Although the police declined to rule out the possibility of accomplices, they said two other men arrested last week and charged with arson in connection with fires set in the same area were not related to Burkhart or these latest attacks.
Chief Beck said officials would release only limited information while the investigation continues. “This is an ongoing investigation,” he said. “Details about the suspect will not be released tonight. Many questions will go unanswered. That is not because the investigation is dormant.”