An Afghan immigrant wanted for questioning in the bombings that rocked a New York City neighborhood and a New Jersey shore town was captured Monday after being wounded in a gun battle with police that erupted when he was discovered sleeping in a bar doorway, authorities said.
Advertisement
“We did a traffic stop of a vehicle of interest in the investigation”, the FBI tweet said.
Five people who were pulled over Sunday night in a vehicle associated with Rahami, but they were questioned and released, Sweeney said, declining to say whether they might face any charges in future.
According to CNN, the Department of Homeland Security is actively involved in the situations in both NY and New Jersey, trying to confirm if this weekend’s activity is indicative of a possible terror cell.
An explosion in Manhattan on Saturday injured 29 people.
Police stop a auto on the Belt Parkway near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in Brooklyn and take five people in for questioning related to the bombings.
“A few blocks away they found a pressure cooker that looked like it was another bomb that maybe didn’t go off”.
“De Blasio said Rahami’s description – 5’6” tall, 200 pounds, brown hair and facial hair, considered armed and unsafe – has been sent out to New Yorkers via the city’s cell phone alert system. Also Saturday, a pipe bomb exploded about an hour from the Elizabeth train station in Seaside Park, New Jersey, forcing the cancellation of a military charity 5K run. He says the man was initially presumed to be a vagrant, but police officers who responded quickly realized it was Ahmad Khan Rahami.
He said the Union County bomb squad’s robotic device indicated the package could be a live bomb, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state police will decide how to remove the device. After cordoning off the area, a bomb squad used a robot to cut a wire to try to disable the device but inadvertently set off an explosion, he said.
The first device, which exploded on West 23rd Street about 8:30 p.m., appeared to have been caused by an explosive device placed inside a toolbox in front of a building undergoing construction, the law enforcement official said. The New Jersey race was cancelled and no one was injured.
Two men report finding a backpack – later found to contain five explosives – atop a garbage can near the Elizabeth, NJ train station.
No injuries were reported after the blast but it was the first of a series of incidents that has put the U.S. on alert.
All trains going through Elizabeth station on both New Jersey Transit and Amtrak lines have been suspended, according to the respective transportation agencies.
“The FBI is executing a search warrant”, Elizabeth Mayor Christian Bollwage said on CNN.
The remaining four devices will be transferred in protective cases to a local site and then will be taken to the Federal Bureau of Investigation laboratory at Quantico, Virginia, Bollwage said.
The attacks, coming as world leaders gathered in New York City for the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting, heightened concern that similar assaults could be mounted elsewhere, especially in public places with large crowds that are hard to protect. In the other New Jersey incident, investigators discovered three pipe-bomb-type devices wired together, but no one was wounded.
Cuomo said earlier on Sunday that there was “no reason to believe at this time that there is any further, immediate threat” after the events on Saturday.
Advertisement
The Department of Homeland Security is actively monitoring and participating in the investigations in NY and New Jersey. Police also said that they were unlikely to have been organized by an worldwide group, despite a claim by Islamic State that it was responsible for the stabbing in Minnesota.
