A father-son duo accused of squatting in a Queens storefront were charged by the feds Thursday with setting the business on fire — just hours before they were supposed to be evicted.
Narinder Singh, 56, and his 29-year-old-son Jawahar Singh were allegedly caught on the building’s own security cameras placing paper towels on a hot plate to set off the Feb. 18 inferno, federal prosecutors said.
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.
The Singhs, who live on Long Island in Nassau County, have been locked in a yearslong “acrimonious” legal battle with their landlord, who was trying to boot their print shop from the building, according to prosecutors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“At the scene of the fire, the defendant Jawahar Singh stated to FDNY officers that the Print Shop contained internal video surveillance cameras,” the court doc states.
The men were each charged with a count of malicious use of fire to destroy property used in interstate commerce by the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
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