Bombing suspect’s motive sought
Officials try to determine whether man caught after shootout has terrorist ties
The man who police said sowed terror across two states, setting off bombs in Manhattan and on the New Jersey Shore that led to a furious manhunt, was tracked down Monday morning sleeping in the dank doorway of a neighborhood bar and taken into custody after being wounded in a gunbattle with officers.
The frenzied end came on a rain-soaked street in Linden, N.J., four hours after police issued an unprecedented cellphone alert to millions of people in the area telling them to be on the lookout for Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, who was described as “armed and dangerous.”
Even as the remarkably swift arrest eased fears across the region, investigators were still in the earliest stages of trying to determine what provoked the attacks, why a street in Chelsea was one of the targets and whether the bomber was aided by others. While investigators have been focused on Rahami’s actions immediately before and after the bombings, they also were working Monday to trace his activities and travel in recent months and years.
One law enforcement official said the bomb technicians involved in the investigation believed Rahami constructed all
the devices, and his handiwork raised the possibility that he had received training from someone with experience building improvised explosive devices.
“If you’re working off the premise that the guy made all these devices,” the official said, “then the guy is a pretty good bomb-maker. And you don’t get that good on the internet.”
Rahami and his family had traveled periodically to Pakistan, and on one trip, he stayed for nearly a year. A senior law enforcement official said no evidence had yet been uncovered that he had received military training abroad.
The senior law enforcement official said FBI agents were examining Rahami’s electronic devices as part of an effort to determine if he was inspired or directed by the Islamic State or any other terrorist organization.
Assistant Director William Sweeney, who heads the FBI’s New York office, said investigators had not found any indication that there is a terrorist cell operating in the area or in the city, he said.
The arrest was the culmination of a sweeping, connect-the-dots manhunt that grew in urgency as police and FBI agents pieced together clues gleaned from both high-tech investigative tools and practiced detective work.
Linking the bomb blasts
The weekend began with what seemed like an odd and troubling event, but one that hardly aroused widespread alarm. At 9:30 a.m. Eastern time Saturday, three pipe bombs tied together blew apart a trash can just before the scheduled start of a Marine Corps run called Seaside Semper Fi in Seaside Park, N.J.
Only one of the three bombs had detonated and no one was injured. The FBI was brought in to investigate, but there was no indication about what would unfold 11 hours later.
Investigators believe Rahami drove a car registered to his father into New York shortly before the Chelsea blast erupted at 8:30 p.m.
In a review of surveillance video, the police later saw him near West 23rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas wearing a backpack investigators believe contained one pressure cooker bomb. He was pulling a patterned duffle-type rolling bag that they believe contained another pressure cooker bomb and wearing a fanny pack on his left hip.
A short time later, a powerful explosion sent debris flying and shattered windows up and down the block. The bomb, filled with shrapnel and placed under a Dumpster on the busy crosstown thoroughfare, injured 29 people.
City streets were soon locked down and a tip to 911 led police to a second device, the other pressure cooker bomb with a cellphone attached, four blocks to the north. Surveillance video would later show Rahami on West 27th Street, without his backpack but pulling the patterned bag and leaving it beside a mailbox.
But it would take hours to gather and analyze all of that video and zero in on Rahami as the man who left the bag behind. All officials knew Saturday night was that someone had deliberately placed bombs on a city street. Mayor Bill de Blasio was hesitant to call it an act of terrorism and officials cautioned against linking the attack to the explosion in New Jersey.
The unexploded bomb found on West 27th Street, however, held critical clues. Once the police were able to remove it and examine it, they discovered a fingerprint that matched one in an arrest record for Rahami.
They also found similarities between the New York and New Jersey bombs, leading them to reverse their conclusion that they were not linked.
By Sunday, the authorities were monitoring addresses associated with Rahami. Increasingly confident that he was involved with the bombings, they made the decision to act when they saw a vehicle leaving one of those addresses.
The car was pulled over on the Belt Parkway near the VerrazanoNarrows Bridge in Brooklyn. Five people inside, some of them Rahami’s relatives, were questioned and released.
Attempted murder charges
Later Sunday night, police received a report of a suspicious package near a train station in Elizabeth, N.J. The FBI, which responded, deployed a pair of robots to examine the bag and determined that it held five bombs, some of which were pipe bombs.
Around 12:30 a.m., the robots tried to clip a wire to disarm one bomb and accidentally detonated it. No one was injured.
The location of the bag was not far from where the Rahami family ran a restaurant, and before dawn Monday, federal agents and local police officers were swarming a neighborhood of low-rise apartment buildings and small businesses.
They searched the restaurant, First American Fried Chicken, and addresses where Rahami was reported to have spent time.
Even as the police scoured the area near the restaurant, Rahami was seeking shelter from the morning rain under a doorway of a bar, Merdie’s Tavern, in the
neighboring town of Linden, trying to catch some sleep. Around 10:30 a.m. the owner spotted a man sleeping in the bar’s doorway, officials said.
Capt. James Sarnicki of the Linden Police Department told reporters that an officer approached the man, later identified as Rahami, and when he woke him, he saw that he had a beard resembling that of the man on the wanted poster.
The officer ordered him to show his hands, Sarnicki said, but instead, he pulled out a handgun, shooting an officer in the abdomen; the bullet struck his vest.
“The officer returned fire,” he said. Rahami fled, “indiscriminately firing his weapon at passing vehicles.”
Other officers joined the chase, and Rahami was shot multiple times. At least one other officer was wounded during the confrontation.
Shortly after 11 a.m., Rahami was in custody, splayed out beside the street, hands cuffed behind his back and his shirt rolled up, officers standing over him with their weapons drawn.
Rahami, blood pouring from a wound in his shoulder and splattered on his face, was loaded onto a stretcher and taken to University Hospital in Newark.
By sundown, Rahami had been charged with seven counts, including five counts of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, with bail set at $5.2 million.