FULTON COUNTY, Ga. — A man accused of shooting his friend in the face almost 30 years ago has been indicted in his murder, the Fulton County District Attorney's Office said.
Muhammad Bilal El-Amin, who was at one point classified as the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "Most Wanted," was indicted on Feb. 24, 2023, on felony murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charges. El-Amin is accused of shooting and killing Jafferd Tucker, Jr. in November of 1994.
Prosecutors said El-Amin shot the 18-year-old in his face inside the Oakland City MARTA station along Lee Street in Atlanta on Nov. 27, 1994. A MARTA employee heard the single gunshot and saw El-Amin running. The same employee witnessed Tucker bleeding from his mouth before he collapsed to the ground and died, the district attorney's office said.
Detectives identified El-Amin as the main suspect in Tucker's death three days after the shooting. El-Amin was on the run for more than two decades.
An Oconee County Sheriff's Office deputy arrested El-Amin during a traffic stop in August of 2022. Prosecutors said he was taken into custody after the deputy noticed he was carrying a suspended South Carolina diver's license with the name Rais A. Sekhem.
El-Amin pleaded with the deputies simply to give him citations for the offenses and let him go, but they told him the law required them to take him into custody.
“I beg you, I beg of you all,” he's heard saying in body camera video. “I have children, I have a sick uncle and I run the household --I’m not a criminal, I’m not a crook.”
Once he was fingerprinted and booked in the Fulton County Jail, authorities learned he was a fugitive.
“I think that today was his worst day ever,” Tucker's uncle, Ernest Cook said when El-Amin was arrested last summer, “and it is the greatest day for me and my family.”
Cook said Tucker and El-Amin had met each other only a short time before his nephew was murdered. El-Amin, who was 19 at the time of the shooting, has now been formally charged in Tucker's death.
"We hope the indictment of El-Amin brings the victim's family some sense of closure," District Attorney Fani Willis said in a news release.