PHOENIX – Police departments in three Valley cities combined forces to identify and arrest a suspect in a 2023 sexual assault case.
Mohammad Bishawi, 33, was taken into custody Monday after DNA samples from two separate investigations were found to match, according to the Phoenix Police Department.
Bishawi was booked into jail on two counts of sexual assault and one count of kidnapping related to an attack in north Phoenix over two years ago. His bond was set at $500,000.
The incident occurred near 19th Avenue and Thunderbird Road on May 26, 2023. Bishawi allegedly entered the victim’s place of business for a massage and hid behind a door before sexually assaulting her, police said.
The victim provided a description of the suspect and his car but could not identify him. Detectives collected physical evidence and submitted it to the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) — a national database of genetic evidence collected from offenders and crime scenes – as an unknown male.
How did police identify suspect in Phoenix sexual assault case?
Nineteen months later, in December 2024, a woman reported that her rideshare driver tried to sexually assault her in Gilbert. Police identified Bishawi as a suspect in that case and obtained a search warrant to collect DNA from him.
The Mesa Police Department processed the DNA evidence and entered it into CODIS, getting a match with the unsolved Phoenix sexual assault case.
When detectives presented a photographic lineup to the Phoenix victim, she picked out Bishawi as her attacker.
The Gilbert case remains under investigation.
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