The five explosive devices were found in a backpack near a New Jersey train station.
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Investigators and emergency personnel are working around the clock as they work to find the people behind a powerful explosion in Manhattan that injured 29 people.
Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, was arrested in New Jersey on Monday hours after he was publicly identified as the suspect in connection with explosives planted in New York City and New Jersey state.
Authorities also were investigating a pipe bombing that occurred earlier on September 17 in New Jersey at the site of a five kilometer running race to benefit U.S. Marines. “We’re going to have more security personnel than ever assembled over this next week during the UN General Assembly”, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on CNN. The bag contained five vehicles, one of which exploded when the bomb squad tried to neutralize him with a robot.
Linden is four miles (6km) south-west of the city of Elizabeth, where further devices were found late on Sunday. Senior law enforcement sources say officials are looking into whether anyone else may have been involved. An unexploded pressure-cooker bomb was found several blocks away.
Rahami, a naturalized USA citizen from Afghanistan.
A law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Times they had “conclusive evidence that Mr. Rahami was connected not just to the Manhattan explosion in the Chelsea neighborhood, but also to a bombing that took place earlier on Saturday on the Jersey Shore”. “The more we learn with each passing hour, it looks more like terrorism”, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a TV interview today.
After ruling out terrorism earlier, NY mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday investigators were “leaning more in the direction that this was a specific act of terror”. Cuomo said that, while the bombs discovered in Manhattan and New Jersey were not identical, there were “certain commonalities” among the chemicals and technologies used.
“We are very fortunate the suspect was apprehended“, the newly appointed NY police commissioner James O’Neill told reporters at a press conference Monday, adding that NYPD is very vigilant about terrorism because “we are the number one target in the world”. No one was injured in this incident.
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Rahami’s reported arrest came around four hours after the Federal Bureau of Investigation released a mugshot of the brown-haired and bearded Rahami, calling him “armed and unsafe”, in text message alerts sent to millions of people in the NY area.
