Rahami was wounded, taken into custody and charged with five counts of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer after a shootout with police in Linden, N.J, on Monday.
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Ahmad Khan Rahami is charged with the use of a weapon of mass destruction, bombing a public place, destruction of property and use of a destructive device, according to court documents.
Criminal complaints in Manhattan and New Jersey federal courts provided chilling descriptions of what authorities say drove the Afghan-born US citizen to set off explosives in NY and New Jersey, including a bomb that injured over two dozen people when it blew up on a busy Manhattan street.
Two officers were wounded in the shootout, although not critically.
The FBI and New York City Police Department had identified Rahami as a suspect in the series of attacks on Monday morning, while New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio described him as “armed and unsafe”.
Ahmad Khan Rahami is facing charges in two states after investigators say he planted a series of bombs in NY and New Jersey, including one that injured 31 people when it blew up on a busy street.
The priority was to arrest the suspect and now that that has been done the investigation can focus on other things, like determining if he acted alone and the motive for the attacks, but authorities still do not know that, New York Police Chief James O’Neill said at a press conference.
Investigators said Tuesday Rahami was also linked to a cluster of pipe bombs found at a commuter rail station in Elizabeth, New Jersey, late Sunday, not far from where the suspect was later captured.
Rahami was not listed on U.S. counterterrorism databases, three USA officials told Reuters. He later became a naturalized USA citizen whose last known address was in Elizabeth, N.J.
Sires said his office wrote a letter to the US embassy in Pakistan to check on the status of the case and the woman received a visa. They said he’s OK, he’s clear, he’s not a terrorist. “Things are moving very quickly”, Mr.de Blasio had said on CNN.
Rahami’s father told reporters on Tuesday outside the family’s fried chicken restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, that he called the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the time because Rahami “was doing real bad”, having stabbed a brother and hit his mother.
According to the New York Times, no evidence has yet been found that Rahami had military training overseas. Sweeney said they had received information that he was involved in some kind of domestic dispute, but he also said that Rahami was not presently on the FBI’s radar. It argues that officers and city representatives said “the restaurant presented a danger to the community”.
“The robot that went in to disarm it, cut a wire and it exploded”, Bollwage said.
Responding to the allegations that Rahami had bought materials for the bombs on eBay, the company said that it has been proactively working with law enforcement authorities on their investigation.
She wouldn’t provide further details, but a government official and a law enforcement official who were briefed on the investigation told The Associated Press that five people in the vehicle were being questioned at an FBI building in Manhattan. Police provided no specific description of the men who they said took the bag.
Officials haven’t revealed any details about the makeup of the pressure cooker device, except to say it had wires and a cellphone attached to it.
Additionally, in 2011 the Rahami family alleged discrimination and harassment in a lawsuit filed against the city and its police department, arguing that officials conspired against them by subjecting them to citations for allegedly violating a city ordinance on hours of operation. New York’s mayor called the bombing that injured 29 people in the bustling Chelsea district “an act of terror”. On Saturday, a pressure-cooker bomb packed with shrapnel exploded in Chelsea, and another device was found in the same neighborhood later that day.
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“He looked like a bum”, Mazza said.
