Gokada founder: Tech Entrepreneurs Dismembered Body Found in Luxury Manhattan Condo

Friends identified the victim as Fahim Saleh, and law enforcement officials said that an electric saw had been found near his torso.

A man’s decapitated, dismembered body was found in an apartment in a luxury condominium building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on Tuesday afternoon, officials said.

When detectives began investigating, they found the man’s torso and an electric saw nearby, two law enforcement officials briefed on the matter said. The man’s head and limbs were later found in the apartment, a Police Department spokesman said.

There were several large plastic bags in the apartment, and it appeared that some effort had been made to clean up any evidence of what had happened, one law enforcement officials briefed on the matter said.

The police did not immediately identify the man, but several friends who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he was Fahim Saleh, a 33-year-old technology entrepreneur and the owner of the condo where the body was found.

Mr. Saleh’s sister made the gruesome discovery at around 3:30 p.m. when she went to check on him after not hearing from him for a day, the officials said. After finding the body, she called the police, officials said.

The saw was still plugged into an electrical outlet when the police arrived, leading detectives to investigate whether the arrival of Mr. Saleh’s sister at the condo might have interrupted the killing and prompted the killer to flee through another exit, one of the law enforcement officials said.

The medical examiner has not officially determined the cause of death, but police were investigating the incident as a homicide, the officials said.

One of the law enforcement officials said a surveillance camera had captured video of Mr. Saleh in the building’s elevator with another person who was wearing a black suit and black mask.

On the video, the elevator door opens and Mr. Saleh goes into the apartment, the official said. The masked person follows directly behind him, and the two immediately start to struggle, the official said.

The sister is seen on the video arriving a short time later. There is a second way out of the apartment through a service entrance, the official said.

Friends of Mr. Saleh described him as an ambitious man who ran every morning, kept a busy schedule of meetings and often traveled to Nigeria on business. He collected tech gadgets and lived alone with a small dog, Laila, which was found alive in the apartment, they said.

According to a 2016 blog profile,  Mr. Saleh was born in Saudi Arabia, and moved with his family quite a bit before settling in Rochester, N.Y., and, later, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, he learned to code and began to develop apps as a teenager, his friends said. After graduating from Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., he had early success with PrankDial, an app he invented for making prank telephone calls.

Mr. Saleh’s ride-hailing motorcycle start-up, Gokada, began operating in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2018, and raised $5.3 million in venture capital in June 2019, according to the website Techcrunch. As in many large African cities, motorcycle taxis are common in Lagos because they can zip through traffic-clogged streets.

Mr. Saleh told TechCrunch he planned to use the money to expand Gokada’s fleet and to offer goods and services to its drivers.

“We’re going to start a Gokada club in each of the cities with a restaurant where drivers can relax, and we’ll experiment with a Gokada Shop, where drivers can get things they need on a regular basis, such as plantains, yams and rice,” Mr. Saleh told TechCrunch.