A 22-year old Muslim man from Van Nuys has been arrested in what appears to be a revenge attack against the family of his former girlfriend: Rampage against Anaheim family tied to breakup?

She was a college freshman whose Hindu family didn’t believe in dating before marriage. He was a Muslim, which troubled her parents, and they convinced her that he wasn’t the one.

Their breakup, investigators said, might have played a role in a string of vicious crimes that unfolded in Orange County last week: Her Anaheim Hills home was set ablaze, her mother savagely beaten and her father and sister killed. The victims had been strangled, bludgeoned, burned and stabbed, according to court records.

The young man, Iftekhar Murtaza, 22, of Van Nuys, was arrested last weekend at the Phoenix airport in connection with the slayings. He had left Southern California after investigators questioned him and was carrying a one-way ticket to Bangladesh.

Phone records indicated that Murtaza’s cellphone had been used less than two miles from one of the crime scenes an hour or so before the killings. He told authorities he was not in Anaheim that day, court documents said. …

A few weeks before the slayings, Murtaza and his girlfriend, Shayona Dhanak, an 18-year-old UC Irvine student, had broken up after three years. It was unclear how the pair met and how they had dated for so long despite her family’s disapproval.

Murtaza had stayed off and on at a condominium on Langdon Avenue in North Hills, where his parents most recently lived. He worked at a loan company, said a woman affiliated with the Langdon Village homeowners association. His penchant for blowing through stop signs in flashy cars — first a Mustang convertible, lately a Range Rover — annoyed neighbors, said the woman, who declined to give her name. Murtaza has been ticketed for speeding in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Murtaza’s family sold the condo about a month ago and had purchased real estate in Gilbert, Ariz., property records show. His father, however, still works at a convenience store in Van Nuys called Discount Cigarette. He declined to comment Wednesday. “I strongly believe that he has no part in it,” said Ishtiak Murtaza, one of Iftekhar Murtaza’s older brothers, according to the Associated Press.

And this AP story at Fox news exhibits that peculiar reluctance to state facts that we’ve come to expect in stories of this nature: Authorities Believe Religious Differences Played Role in Slaying of California Father, Daughter.

ANAHEIM, California  —  A man held for questioning in the murder of a father and daughter in California was upset with the family because they broke off his relationship with another daughter for religious reasons, court documents indicated.

Friends told the Orange County Register newspaper the victims were devoutly Hindu, and court papers said the religions in question were Hindu and Muslim.

Do the math.