A man suspected of slashing a woman with a machete on the New York subway has handed himself into police after he allegedly threatened to ‘chop up’ his victim.
Ras Alula Nagarit is accused of attacking the woman on Tuesday at the Atlantic Avenue/Barclays Center station in Brooklyn.
The 37-year-old suspect handed himself in after the NYPD released a photograph taken by the victim moments before the attack.
The woman told detectives that the suspect warned ‘I will chop you up’ before slashing her on the hand.
The pair were riding on a 3 train in Brooklyn at the time of the attack.
According to the New York Post, Nagarit was charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon and menacing. He is due to appear in Brooklyn Criminal Court for arraignment later this morning.
There have been at least five suspected slasher attacks on the subway since the beginning of the year.
Earlier this week, Damon Knowles was charged with assault with intent to cause and serious physical injury.
Carmen Rivera, a mother-of-three and grandmother-of-nine, was attacked on Monday morning on a southbound 6 train that was approaching the Bleecker Street station around 7.15am.
The NYPD said a male passenger sitting across from Rivera lashed out at her. Both the man and Rivera got off at the next stop.
Footage from inside the subway station shows the suspect jumping over the turnstile as he ran away.
Knowles reportedly became a suspect after he was charged with criminal trespass and resisting arrest in another incident on Tuesday, according to the Daily News.
Speaking outside her home on Tuesday, Rivera said she did not realize she had been cut until getting off the train.
She said the man fell on her as she was sitting, and somehow managed to hide the slashing and the blade.
Rivera needed 30 stitches to close the four-inch cut on her left cheek.
However she insisted on returning to her job as a sample maker on Tuesday, and remains defiant about what happened to her.
‘What’s going to happen is going to happen. That’s it,’ she told CBS New York.
‘I’m not afraid. I’ve never been afraid. I guess that is just me.’
‘I take that train every morning.’
Family members said Rivera initially denied what happened to her, saying she had cut herself at work, before finally admitting that she was attacked.
Anthony Cristopher-Smith, 30, from Newark, New Jersey, was walking in the East village on January 19 when a man yelling profanities knocked him off his feet and slashed him in the face from his ear to his jawline.
Police later arrested Francis Salud, 28, in connection to the attack. Salud has also been charged for a similar attack on East 23rd Street in October.
On New Year’s Day, a 28-year-old woman suffered a facial wound at the hands of a total stranger in The Bronx, and less than a week later, 24-year-old Amanda Morris was sliced with a sharp object while walking to work in Chelsea.
Kari Bazemore, a 41-year-old man suffering from mental illness, has been charged in connection to both attacks. He was also linked to several similar incidents across the city in recent months.