Ahmad Khan Rahami – identified in an Federal Bureau of Investigation bulletin just hours earlier as a man wanted in the weekend bombings in New York City and New Jersey – pulled a gun, shot the officer and triggered a running gun battle in the street that ended with Rahami wounded and in custody Monday, authorities said.
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Ahmad Khan Rahami is accused of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, unlawful possession of a weapon and possession of a weapon for an unlawful goal, prosecutors said.
When a police officer went to investigate and wake him, he realised he resembled the man in the wanted poster, the mayor said.
The confrontation sparked a shootout that ended in Rahami’s capture.
A bloodied Rahami was loaded into the back of an ambulance, just 50 hours after the first blast that started it all.
So when the 28-year-old Afghan immigrant was named Monday as the lead “person of interest” in bombings in NY and New Jersey, then apprehended hours later in a shootout with police, people in this gritty neighborhood a few miles from Newark’s airport could scarcely believe it.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said that there were no other suspects being pursued at this time.
The official says investigators recovered his fingerprints from the scene.
New Jersey authorities also believe that he might be linked to the bomb explosion early Saturday in the town of Seaside Park, New Jersey. No one was injured.
Authorities believe Rahami was responsible for the bomb that ripped through Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday night, an unexploded pressure cooker bomb found four blocks away, plus a bomb that exploded 80 miles (130 km) away earlier on Saturday at a Marine charity race on the New Jersey shore.
Neighbors had complained to Elizabeth officials that the Rahamis’ restaurant was a late-night nuisance, Elizabeth Mayor Christian Bollwage said.
– Rahami traveled for extended periods to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the last five years, officials said.
But some of the family restaurant’s customers said that while Rahami was devout, he was more likely to talk about his interest in cars than to mention faith. “Cops are the real heroes, law enforcement are the real heroes”, said Mr Bains, who, news reports said, was being praised as a “hero”.
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.
A federal law enforcement official said BBs and ball bearings were among the pieces of metal that appeared to be packed into the pressure cooker bombs in NY.
As police searched for Ahmad Rahami on Monday, the owner of a bar in Linden found a man sleeping in his hallway.
Local residents in Elizabeth, who had encountered Mr Rahami in his work at the family’s fried chicken bar, said the family were ordinary and “Americanised”.
U.S. President Barack Obama, who spoke by phone with some of the officers involved in the arrest, praised police for the quick apprehension and said he saw no connection between the explosions and a separate weekend incident where a man stabbed nine people at a mall in central Minnesota before being shot dead. Two police officers were wounded in the gun battle.
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After the officer ordered the suspect to show his hands, the man “pulled out a handgun and fired one shot at the officer, striking him in the abdomen”, Sarnicki said. “We will direct the full resources of the federal government to make sure that the investigation goes forward aggressively”, Obama said.
