U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara filed the charges in a Manhattan court.
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Police investigating the bombings in NY and New Jersey have been saying for several days they were looking for the men, who they stressed were being sought as potential witnesses in the case, not as suspects.
Today, he was also charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and bombing public places.
Rahami was wounded in a shootout with police and is in a hospital in New Jersey.
Two cell phones used in the bombs were shipped to a Perth Amboy, New Jersey, store located about 500 meters from a residence listed on Rahami’s 2012 passport application as home.
The FBI has said Rahami apparently was not on its radar at the time of the bombing. “The blast shattered windows as far as approximately 400 feet from the detonation site and, vertically, more than three stories high, ” according to court documents.
Pieces of the device were found 650 feet away from the initial explosion.
Another refers in glowing terms to Osama Bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Muslim cleric killed in a 2011 drone strike, and Nidal Hasan, a former Army officer who killed 13 people at a Texas Army base in 2009. There are mentions of pipe bombs, a pressure cooker bomb and a partial sentence, “in the streets they plan to run a mile”.
“The criminal complaint filed by federal authorities in NY states that a handwritten journal recovered from Rahami after his arrest lauds Osama Bin Laden and says “(God willing) the sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets.
The complaint offers evidence that Rahami was motivated by an extremist Islamic ideology that he recorded in a notebook he had with him when he was shot and wounded by the police in Linden, N.J., early Monday and then taken into custody. “Death To Your OPPRESSION”.
His father, Mohammad Rahami said he told the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2014 that his son was a terrorist threat.
The FBI interviewed Rahami’s father in 2014 after a violent domestic dispute.
However, there are contradictory accounts of how Rahami came to the attention of law enforcement.
Tucker reported from Washington.
That issue arose after the Orlando massacre in June, when FBI Director James Comey said agents a few years earlier had looked into the gunman, Omar Mateen, but did not find enough information to pursue charges or keep him under investigation.
Rahami has had past run-ins with the law, including charges in 2014 that he stabbed one of his brothers.
The FBI never interviewed Ahmad Rahami, according to officials.
“I don’t like to think about what could have happened, but I’m just so blessed and glad it didn’t”, Lee Parker said. She also said that Saturday’s stabbing attack in Minnesota, in which 10 people were injured, is being investigated as an act of terrorism.
It was unclear when Rahami married his wife, Asia, but after returning from a almost yearlong visit to Pakistan in March 2014, he was increasingly desperate to get her into the country. Authorities are working to bring her back into the country as soon as possible.
She left the United States shortly before Saturday’s attacks and was stopped in the United Arab Emirates, US media reported.
On a trip to Pakistan in 2014, Rahami emailed his local congressman seeking help because his pregnant wife had an expired passport. They were told she would have to remain in Pakistan until she’d had her child, ABC News reports.
Ahmad Rahami met and married Asia Bibi in 2011 while in Pakistan and the two had a child together, law enforcement sources say. She is now said to be cooperating with authorities. She has spoken with USA officials in the UAE.
The men were in the area the same hour that an explosive device detonated on West 23rd Street.
The man suspected of setting off bombs in NY and New Jersey used to work as an unarmed guard at private security companies, including one that provided services to The Associated Press.
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“It’s a good sign that we found him in a doorway”, O’Neill told CBS “This Morning”.
