(Ellis Kaplan)
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A devout Muslim man who was stabbed as he tried to open the door to a Queens mosque on Sunday says his hate-spewing attacker had better watch his back.
“If I see him again, I will kill him from 20 feet away,” 57-year-old Bashir Ahmad told The Post yesterday. “I will hurt him.”
Ahmad was recovering from puncture wounds to his head, face, leg, back and hands after being savagely beaten and stabbed outside Masjid al-Saaliheen in Flushing as he opened it for morning prayers around 4:45 a.m.
Police said the locks to the storefront mosque might have been tampered with, making it difficult for Ahmad to open them and giving his assailant time to launch his assault. It’s unclear whether Ahmad was targeted or was the victim of a random hate crime.
Ahmad, a halal food-truck vendor, said his still at-large assailant spouted anti-Muslim epithets after he approached Ahmad from behind.
“I went to put the key inside. The guy came at me,” Ahmad said yesterday.
“He said, ‘I will kill you, you f—king Muslim!’ ” he recalled.
“He bit my nose. He was saying, ‘I kill the Muslims! I’m going to kill you!’ ” said Ahmad, who is from Afghanistan. “I was telling him, ‘I’m the wrong guy.’
“He goes one, two, three, four, five, six times with the knife,” said Ahmad. “I took his hands and grab the handle of the knife. We were fighting.
“I bumped my head into him and broke his eye. I grabbed his hands and bit his thumb.
“He didn’t want my money,” Ahmad said, discounting that the attacker may have wanted to rob him. “My money was in my pocket.
“If police get him, I will ask him, ‘Why you hurt me? What did I do to you?’ ” Ahmad said.
Ahmad was taken to Queens General Hospital after the attack and was released with staples and stitches to his head and leg.
“I am in pain,” he said. “I am taking medicine all day.”
Ahmad said he didn’t recognize his attacker and described him as “a Russian Jew.”
Police said they are investigating the attack as a possible hate crime and searching for the thug, whom they described as a Hispanic man in his 40s, about 6 feet tall and 180 pounds.
He was last seen wearing a blue baseball cap, a black jacket, jeans and possibly glasses.
“We have some leads,” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said. “We believe maybe the lock had been tampered with.”
Ahmad said the mosque had never previously been the site of any hate attack
Cops don’t think the stabbing was related to the suspected serial killer slaying of three Middle Eastern shopkeepers in Brooklyn.
“While we’re not going to rule anything out, there does not appear to be any connectivity at this time,” Kelly said.
Additional reporting by Kirstan Conley