The father of Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man suspected of planting bombs in NY and New Jersey, told media personnel outside his restaurant on Tuesday that he had informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation twice about his son’s reported radicalisation about two years ago. The second device – the one the two men in the photo removed from a suitcase – was found unexploded several hours later on 27th Street. Gun shots to your police.
Advertisement
According to court documents, prosecutors wanted to charge Rahami over a domestic dispute. According to federal authorities, Rahami feared that he would be captured before he could carry out a suicide attack in the country.
The criminal complaint said authorities found a handwritten journal on Rahami that contained references to “brother Osama Bin Laden” and Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida propagandist who was killed in a 2011 drone strike.
Rahami also remains charged with five counts of attempted murder of a police officer by the Union County Prosecutor’s Office for the shootout Monday during his arrest.
The FBI said the bombing in Chelsea involved a “high-explosive main charge” and the explosion “caused significant injuries and multiple-million dollars of property damage across a 650-foot crime scene”. He is now recovering at University Hospital from gunshot wounds sustained during his arrest, where he has reportedly refused to answer questions from federal agents.
However, there are contradictory accounts of how Rahami came to the attention of law enforcement.
In August 2014, Rahami was accused of stabbing Nasim Rahami in the leg, and charged with aggravated assault and unlawful possession of a knife. A grand jury declined to indict him despite a warning from an officer that Rahami was likely a “danger to himself or others”. ‘But they check nearly two months, they say, ‘He’s O.K., he’s clean, he’s not a terrorist.’ I say O.K’. But asked whether he thought his son was a terrorist, the father said: “No”.
Waters added that the men might not even know what they did.
The Times reported that they could not confirm if law enforcement officials interviewed Rahami at the time of his father’s allegations.
According to CBS, the suspect “fumed” about the US government slaughtering “Muslim holy warriors” in the journal and wrote about exacting revenge. They made off with the bag the bomb was in, but left the explosive device behind. The phone used in the Chelsea bombing was “registered to a family member of Rahami’s”, the complaint reads.
He will be transported to Manhattan to face the charges, said federal prosecutors in NY. Rahami often was hundreds of dollars in arrears in child support and their custody case was called before a family court judge six times in five years, records show. Another bomb that exploded on the New Jersey shore did not hurt anyone but forced the cancellation of a Marine Corps charity race. The complaint said 31 people were injured in that incident.
Advertisement
It has emerged that one British national was among those injured by the pressure-cooker bomb in the Chelsea neighbourhood on Saturday night.
