A father-son duo accused of squatting in a Queens storefront were charged by the feds Thursday with setting the business on fire \u2014 just hours before they were supposed to be evicted.<\/p>\n
Narinder Singh, 56, and his 29-year-old-son Jawahar Singh were allegedly caught on the building\u2019s own security cameras placing paper towels on a hot plate to set off the Feb. 18 inferno, federal prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
The fire took place on Feb. 18. FelixChin<\/p>\n
Authorities only became aware of the footage after the younger alleged firebug told about the video system in the Richmond Hill store, the feds said.<\/p>\n
The Singhs, who live on Long Island in Nassau County, have been locked in a yearslong \u201cacrimonious\u201d legal battle with their landlord, who was trying to boot their print shop from the building, according to prosecutors.<\/p>\n
The landlord claimed in civil court docs that the pair were squatters who signed a fake lease for the space, according to the criminal complaint filed against the father and son.<\/p>\n
The interior of a burned and destroyed print shop in Queens. FelixChin<\/p>\n
The standoff came to a head on Feb. 17, when a judge denied an emergency request by the Singhs to avoid being evicted from the space the next day, federal authorities said.<\/p>\n
At around 8:15 p.m. that night, the pair were seen on video moving a table with the hot plate and rolls of papers towels on it to a section of the store, and then plugging into an electrical outlet, according to the complaint.<\/p>\n
The dad and son left, and four hours later, one of the paper towels caught fire, leading to a quick-spreading blaze just after midnight that destroyed the entire space, the complaint states.<\/p>\n
Narinder Singh FelixChin<\/p>\n
Jawahar Singh FelixChin<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the scene of the fire, the defendant Jawahar Singh stated to FDNY officers that the Print Shop contained internal video surveillance cameras,\u201d the court doc states.<\/p>\n
The men were each charged with a count of malicious use of fire to destroy property used in interstate commerce by the US Attorney\u2019s Office for the Eastern District of New York. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A father-son duo accused of squatting in a Queens storefront were charged by the feds Thursday with setting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154563,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[3094,11827,303,194,544,57,9,56,63,65,64,122,58],"class_list":{"0":"post-154562","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-arson","9":"tag-brooklyn-federal-court","10":"tag-crime","11":"tag-fdny","12":"tag-fires","13":"tag-metro","14":"tag-new-york","15":"tag-ny","16":"tag-nyc","17":"tag-nyc-headlines","18":"tag-nyc-news","19":"tag-queens","20":"tag-us-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}