Investigators haven’t been able to question a man charged with setting off bombs in NY and New Jersey because he’s too severely injured from his shootout with police, a law enforcement official said Thursday as the man’s father said he’d warned federal authorities about the man’s interest in jihadist material.
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Rahami, 28, was arrested on Monday following a shoot-out with police in Linden, New Jersey.
Federal prosecutors have charged Ahmad Khan Rahami with detonating a pipe bomb in a New Jersey shore town on Saturday morning and a pressure cooker bomb in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood later that night.
“In the last month, I’ve seen him driving three fancy SUVs, with New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania license plates”, said one woman who lives around the corner from Rahami’s Elizabeth home and refused to be identified. To buy a handgun in Virginia, one must be a resident of the state, but one official said Rahami was able to legally purchase the gun in Salem because he presented a valid Virginia state ID with an address in Roanoke.
Rahami’s wife met with USA law enforcement officials while in the United Arab Emirates and voluntarily gave a statement, a law enforcement official said on Wednesday. On a trip to Pakistan in 2014, Rahami emailed his local congressman seeking help because his pregnant wife had an expired passport.
“The way he speaks, his videos, when I see these things that he listens to, for example, al-Qaeda, Taliban, he watches their videos, their poetry”, he said he told federal agents.
Investigators are still gathering evidence and have not publicly tied Rahami to those devices, though Sweeney noted they aren’t “ruling anything out”. He is not in sufficient physical health for court, according to a federal filing.
AP global security chief Danny Spriggs said he learned this week that Rahami worked there and often engaged colleagues in long political discussions, expressing sympathy for the Taliban and disdain for US military action in Afghanistan.
Nobody has any right to kill any non-Muslim, the imam said.
Authorities don’t consider her a suspect, but they are trying to determine whether her husband acted alone.
David Patton, head of the New York City federal public defenders office, asked to meet with Rahami.
The father of Ahmad Rahami, the Afghan-born man arrested after bombings in NY and New Jersey, says he reported concerns about his son to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2014. A USA magistrate judge late on Wednesday said he accepted that position.
“The Government asserts unequivocally that the defendant ‘is not in federal custody, ‘” Judge Gabriel Gorenstein wrote in an order.
Federal prosecutors in NY and New Jersey issued criminal complaints Tuesday evening charging Rahami in weekend bombings in both those states. It wasn’t clear when Rahami would get an attorney.
Normally, a US criminal defendant goes before a magistrate with little delay and, if too poor to afford a lawyer, is appointed a lawyer at that first appearance or soon afterward, said Norman Lefstein, an Indiana University law professor. Although the pressure cooker bomb that wounded over two dozen people on the street went off in front of an apartment building for the blind, none of the building’s residents were hurt in the blast. That suitcase apparently contained the second device Rahami is accused of leaving the city, which was discovered and neutralized by law enforcement officials on the scene after a Saturday night explosion wounded 29 people.
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The FBI told The New York Times they had no immediate comment on Mr Rahami’s statements.
