A vengeful woman faces a possible life sentence after a Brooklyn jury found her guilty of helping her soon-to-be-husband kidnap and torture two men, including a would-be suitor who called her a “bland mashed potato” that he could turn into a “mouthwatering” gourmet meal.
Iffat Lubna tried to lay the blame for both of the horrific kidnappings entirely on her husband, with her defense lawyers calling him “the beast” and saying she was terrified to cross him.
But jurors heard a different tale. They were told how it was Lubna’s quest for vengeance over slights from her victims that helped trigger the plot. They listened to shocking audio from the 2023 kidnappings in which Lubna directed her accomplices:
“Tie his mouth up. Tie it up. Bro, give me this. Let me tie his mouth up.”
She told one victim: “You will die in front of me and only then will I find peace …. I will kill you. You can’t make a sound.”
On April 9, the jury convicted the 26-year-old Jamaica, Queens, woman of two counts each of kidnapping and kidnapping conspiracy.
The feds placed Lubna and hubby Abu Chowdhury, who owns a Queens supermarket, at the head of a kidnapping ring that victimized two men within a day of each other in Queens, even forcing one of their victims to beat the other.
The first victim, Mahode Preo, knew Lubna from Bangladesh. He was 21 years old when he came to the U.S. to study in April 2023, and he stayed in the couple’s apartment because she was one of two people he knew when he arrived.
On May 9, 2023, though, Chowdhury started asking Preo about his girlfriend’s past, explaining, “I want to know if she loves or she loves my money. I promise I’ll not tell her I told you anything.”
Preo gave up damning details about Lubna, saying she was promiscuous and did drugs.
He didn’t know Chowdhury was texting Lubna everything he said.
She became enraged, so the couple plotted to kidnap and torture him. The next morning, they lured Preo into a car, took his phone, threatened to kill him and stab him with a screwdriver and repeatedly beat him.
“The defendant and Abu (Chowdhury) recorded Preo’s kidnapping. You heard it for yourself. The beating, the metal clanking against his body, his screams,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie Pak said in her closing argument.
They shuttled Preo around Queens for 36 hours as the couple and other accomplices tortured him. Midway through the ordeal, Lubna got a call from a man who’d turn out to be their next victim.
Mazharul Islam met Lubna in an online English-as-a-second-language class, and he fancied her, so on May 10, 2023, he reached out to her.
“She looked attractive to me and I wanted to become friends with her. And she was from Bangladesh, so I wanted to make a Bangladeshi friend, as well,” Islam explained to the jury. “I don’t remember the entire call, but the gist of the conversation was me asking her whether or not she had a boyfriend, and she told me she didn’t have a boyfriend.”
Islam asked some probing questions, including whether she used drugs or got high — “just to find out what kind of a girl she is, is she a party girl or a regular girl,” he said — and offered to bring her “Black Label” scotch.
And he then broke out the potato pick-up line: “Think of it like a potato, but it ends up in the hands of poor cook. It becomes a bland mashed potato. But when it’s handled by hotel chefs, it turns into a delicious potato chop,” referring to a South Asian dish. “And that same potato when you imagine it, it can become a mouthwatering Kacchi biryani, just like the potatoes in Kacchi biryani, exactly like that.”
The call enraged Lubna, who was recorded saying, “I want to see his dead body.”
So she agreed to go out with him, but she stood him up. And as he walked back home at 1 a.m. May 11, two men ambushed him and ordered him into a Honda Odyssey minivan, claiming they had a gun.
One of those men turned out to be Chowdhury, who called himself the “King of New York” as he loomed over Islam.
Lubna was sitting in the minivan. They drove him around Queens, took his phone, beat him with a rod, stomped him, shoved his face against a car seat to smother him, used his bank card to withdraw $1,000, then called his father demanding a ransom.
They forced him to smoke a joint, drink alcohol and dropped a pill in his mouth to make him drowsy.
They then took both Islam and Preo, the earlier kidnapping victim, to the Corona Hotel. “Preo was forced to beat Islam or to risk getting beaten again himself,” Pak told the jury. “Islam was dragged into the basement of a dirty abandoned house. His eyes, hands, legs were tied up…. But Islam did something that his kidnappers didn’t expect.”
The Corona Hotel on Roosevelt Ave. in Queens. (Google)
Islam chewed through the tape that bound his hands, freed himself, broke a window and crawled out. Covered in dirt, bruises, scrapes and duct tape, Islam made his way to a nearby house and called 911.
Preo was in a trickier spot — he lived with the couple, and they had his belongings and passport, which meant he was stuck with them for about a month after his abduction ended.
Lubna’s lawyers tried to cast Preo and Islam as liars, and laid the blame entirely on Chowdhury — who also faces charges for a third kidnapping, in March 2023, that Lubna didn’t take part in, as well as these two, for which he’ll stand trial in September.
“She’s not proud of how she acted on May 10, 2023. She was in a state of despair. You heard the recording. As many as times as she said she wanted to kill Preo for spreading rumors about her, she said, ‘I want to die, I will throw myself away and commit suicide,’” defense lawyer Noam Biale told jurors. “She felt like she was about to lose her husband, about to lose the life she had worked so hard to build.”
Still, he said, “You cannot convict Iffat based on what Abu did. You can’t convict her just because she was there. You can’t convict her just because she was married to someone who committed these crimes…. The fact that Iffat was Abu’s wife, and that she was there during the incident with Preo, and for some but a much smaller part of the incident with Islam, that’s not enough.”
The jury ultimately didn’t buy it, and came to a guilty verdict on all four counts in the case.
Lubna remains free on bond until her sentencing at a later date. The maximum sentence is life.
Judge Nina Morrison let her remain free, in part, so she can take care of her young son and hasn’t violated the terms of her bond.
Biale said he’s looking at a possible motion to overturn the verdict.
“The jury clearly struggled with its decision, taking over a day and a half to reach it. We respect their service and will continue to fight for our client,” he said.
Despite the defense’s blame-the-husband strategy, the day of the verdict, Lubna walked out of the court to meet her husband, who was waiting to drive her home.