Gokada CEO Fahim Saleh brutally murdered in New York, dismembered with electric saw

Fahim-Saleh-Gokada

Fahim Saleh

Fahim Saleh

By Michael Adesina

Fahim Saleh, the CEO of Lagos-based Gokada, was found dead in New York on Tuesday, his body dismembered with an electric saw by his killer.

According to Police, his body was cut up and sorted into different plastic bags.

An electric saw which was still plugged in was also found in the apartment.

The incident happened in his luxury Manhattan Lower East Side apartment which he bought for $2.2 million in 2019.

According to Daily News, police moved to his apartment after his sister called the emergency line.

She was reported to have visited the apartment after not hearing from Saleh in a day and became worried.

However, Police made the grisly discovery in a building on E. Houston St. at Suffolk St. on the Lower Eastside about 3:30 p.m.

Cops found contractor bags near the torso, sources said, but didn’t immediately open them to see if the body parts were inside.

Fahim, was last seen on surveillance footage on Monday afternoon around 1:40 pm, when he entered his building’s elevator, which opens right out to his seventh-floor apartment.

According to several reports, police believe they have surveillance footage of the suspect entering the building and then using the elevator.

The footage is said to show the suspect in a glove and a mask covering his face sharing the elevator with Saleh up to the seventh floor.

As the door of the elevator opened directly into Saleh’s apartment, he was seen to fall to the floor immediately as he walked into his home from a possible gunshot.

According to Daily News, Police believe the murder was carried out by a professional because of how the attack happened.

“We have a torso, a head that’s been removed, arms, and legs. Everything is still on the scene. We don’t have a motive,” New York Police Department spokesman Sgt. Carlos Nieves said.

Saleh has described his history as an entrepreneur in a series of posts on Medium.com.

He got his start creating a prank calling website, then moved on to create a motorcycle taxi company in his parents’ native Bangladesh.

He is well known in Lagos, Nigeria where he helped launch Gokada, the former bike hailing company that has pivoted into delivery services following the government’s ban on passenger motorcycles.

Friends of Mr. Saleh, according to New York Times, described him as an ambitious man who ran every morning, kept a busy schedule of meetings and often traveled to Nigeria on business.

He collected tech gadgets and lived alone with a small dog, Laila, which was found alive in the apartment, they said.

Saleh was born in Saudi Arabia 33 years ago.

He moved with his family quite a bit before settling in Rochester, N.Y., and, later, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, he learned to code and began to develop apps as a teenager, his friends said.

After graduating from Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., he had early success with PrankDial, an app he invented for making prank telephone calls.

Mr. Saleh’s ride-hailing motorcycle start-up, Gokada, began operating in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2018, and raised $5.3 million in venture capital in June 2019, according to the website Techcrunch.

Load more