The man suspected in Saturday’s bombings in NY and New Jersey was arrested Monday after a manhunt and shootout.
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Late Monday, a hospitalized Rahami was charged in New Jersey with five counts of attempted murder of police officers in connection with the shootout and was held on $5.2 million bail.
Rahami is an Afghan-born USA citizen.
In one section, the complaint says, Rahami wrote: “Death to your oppression”.
His journal apparently expressed the wish to die a martyr, the criminal complaint revealed. He was captured in Linden, New Jersey, after he was discovered sleeping in the doorway of a bar.
Authorities are also looking at whether the bombing in the Chelsea neighborhood has links to a recent bomb blast in New Jersey which didn’t result in any injuries.
During his 2013 trip, he stayed in Quetta with family members who were refugees, the official said.
Rahami, a US citizen born in Afghanistan, remained hospitalized Tuesday after surgery for a gunshot wound to his leg.
He said there was no indication a terror cell was active in the area. The FBI then interviewed Rahami’s father, who told the FBI that his son had traveled to Pakistan and was interacting with “bad people”, according to sources.
A senior law enforcement official told NBC News that authorities believe Rahami is the man seen in surveillance footage taken Saturday night in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. A grand jury declined to indict him, despite a warning from the arresting officer that Rahami was probably “a danger to himself or others”.
Rahami, a naturalised U.S. citizen, was taken into custody after a shoot-out with police in Linden, a nearby town.
He added that terrorists and violent extremists don’t just want to cause harm to individual people but want to “inspire fear in all of us, and disrupt the way we live, to undermine our values”.
“It is crucial that we continue to build up trust between law enforcement and Muslim American communities”, she said.
Asked Tuesday about Rahami, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama “is confident that the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation will go back and review the interactions that this individual had with law enforcement to determine if there’s something different that could have been done or should have been done to prevent the violence that we saw over the weekend”. Justice Department guidelines restrict the types of actions agents may take; they can not, for instance, record phone calls without obtaining a higher level of approval or developing more grounds for suspicion.
Two officers were wounded in a shootout with Rahami, the Associated Press reported, but were not believed to have been seriously hurt, authorities said. While he did not speak to a possible motive, he said the bombings were being considered an act of terror. At the time, he was employed by Summit Security, a private contractor.
He spent several weeks in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and in Quetta, Pakistan in 2011.
Summit’s vice president of security services, Daniel Sepulveda, said Rahami last did work for the company in 2011 and left the job because he wanted an extended leave that didn’t coincide with his work schedule.
But neighbors aware of tensions over the restaurant said Ahmad Rahami was easy to get along with, if somewhat reserved. He said he had all licenses required by New Jersey law. The lawsuit was terminated in 2012 after Mohammad Rahami pleaded guilty to blocking police from enforcing the restrictions on the restaurant. No one was injured. By far, the bombs took their biggest toll Saturday night in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. An unexploded pressure cooker with a cellphone attached and wires protruding was found four blocks away; it was taken to a firing range, where it was safely detonated.
His fingerprint was also found on one of the pressure-cooker bombs in Manhattan, according to a senior law enforcement official.
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This report contains material from Reuters and the Associated Press.
