Police in New Jersey arrested a man on Monday who is thought to have been behind multiple bomb attacks in New York and New Jersey that occurred over the weekend.
A shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bomb detonated in Manhattan on Saturday night, injuring 29 people.
On Monday morning in Linden, New Jersey, police arrested Ahmad Khan Rahami, a 28-year-old whose fingerprints were found on a piece of the bomb, after a shootout.
Khan was born in Afghanistan but was given a US passport in 2003 and became a naturalized US citizen in 2011, according to CNN.
That same year, authorities say the 28-year-old traveled to Kandahar, Afghanistan and Quetta, Pakistan. He married a Pakistani woman in the Quetta area in 2011, CNN said, citing unnamed law enforcement officials.
Rahami went back to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2013, staying for about a year, the outlet reported.
US authorities say they don’t know if Rahami was radicalized during his trips abroad, and at the time of writing, had not identified any link with radical Islamist groups.
Friends and neighbors of Rahami’s told The Washington Post and The New York Times that Rahami seemed to have become more religious after his trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan, but US authorities have suggested that Khan was not suspected to have been radicalized abroad.
The bomb in Manhattan that injured 29 people was only one of four explosive contraptions that officials say might have been Rahami’s work. On Saturday morning, an explosive went off in a trashcan in Seaside Park, New Jersey, but caused no injuries.
Police also discovered an unexploded pressure-cooker bomb on West 27th Street in Manhattan on Saturday night, just four blocks north of where the first Manhattan blast occurred.
On Sunday, five pipe bombs were found in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Rahami and his family were from and where they owned a restaurant and neighborhood hangout known as First American Fried Chicken, which was the subject of some municipal disputes detailed by Reuters.
The pipe bombs in Elizabeth were successfully disabled by robots, according to the New York Times.
Rahami used to hang out late at his family’s restaurant and do rap battles; he was known to his friends as “Med.” He was captured alive on Monday, so presumably he’ll soon be able to shed more light on his alleged crimes.
HS
