The information emerged as the younger Rahami, 28, was being held on $5.2 million bail, charged with the attempted murder of police officers in the shootout that led to his capture Monday. Another was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
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However, there are contradictory accounts of how Rahami came to the attention of law enforcement.
Rahami is also charged with planting bombs that went off in Seaside Park, New Jersey, and his hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, but did not injure anyone.
Mosque members said Rahami’s father frequently prays there, including this week after Rahami was injured by police in a shootout in Linden hours after he was named the suspect. He also allegedly wrote about wanting to die a martyr but that he was concerned he’d be caught before he could carry out a suicide attack.
Then a shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bomb exploded Saturday night in New York’s Chelsea section, wounding 29 people, none seriously.
A journal seized from Rahami shortly after his arrest suggested the suspect drew inspiration from al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, both killed in separate US operations.
“Around midnight, I heard a big pop sound but I didn’t think much of it. Elizabeth is a very urban city, so you never know the difference between gunshots and firecrackers”, Padilla said.
Rahami was not on the FBI’s radar at the time of the attacks, the L.A. Times reports, but Rahami’s father Mohammad called them in 2014 concerned about his son.
The FBI said on Wednesday that it wanted to speak with two men seen in surveillance footage picking up a second bag containing a pressure-cooker bomb believed to be planted by Rahami in Chelsea on Saturday night.
He said he told the agents he couldn’t say “100 percent if he is a terrorist”. They were interested in the elder brother’s travel, and he had previously come to the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The FBI has faced questions before about whether it could have done more ahead of time to determine whether attackers had terrorist aspirations. Two years ago, Rahami had been living in Pakistan for a year when he contacted the office of Rep. Albio Sires, D-New Jersey. The FBI said it checked databases, consulted other agencies and conducted interviews but found nothing tying Rahami to terrorism. While he was in Pakistan in 2011, Rahami married a Pakistani woman.
Rahami’s wife is thought to be a Pakistani national.
They include six of the men who bombed the trade center in 1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others, and 10 others convicted in 1998 bombings that killed 224 people, including a dozen Americans, at USA embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
That is to be determined, though, at this point in the investigation, Mayor Bill de Blasio said at the same press conference, “There is no other individual we’re looking for at this time”.
Federal agents would like to question Rahami.
The documents also indicate that a diary, which authorities say is Rahami’s, refers to calls for jihad at home if one is unable to travel and mentions “brother Osama Bin Laden”. At the time, he was employed by Summit Security, a private contractor.
AP global security chief Danny Spriggs said Rahami worked night shifts and often engaged colleagues in long political discussions, expressing sympathy for the Taliban and disdain for USA military action in Afghanistan.
Two months later, in July 2014, the FBI took another look at Mateen because his name “surfaced” in a separate terrorism investigation, Comey told reporters.
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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.
