‘Weird,’ ‘aloof’ – & rigged to explode
He was quiet, aloof — and “always angry.’’
Would-be suicide bomber Akayed Ullah immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh nearly seven years ago, an ill-tempered loner living in his parents’ home in Brooklyn — where he surfed ISIS Web sites on his cellphone, authorities and neighbors said Monday.
The brooding 27-year-old loser — now suspected of detonating a bomb in a subway-station passageway near the Port Authority Bus Terminal Monday morning in a flubbed terror attack — arrived in America in 2011 on an F-4 visa reserved for siblings of US residents, authorities said.
Until last year, he appeared to live on and off with relatives in an apartment building on East Second Street in Kensington, where the family was known for being strictly religious, neighbors said.
“They would always go to prayer. They had a big beard and everything,’’ resident Hasan Alam said.
In 2012, Ullah got a license to drive a livery car in the city. Records show he was slapped with two traffic tickets between then and 2015, when his license expired, although transit officials said it was unclear whether he ever worked as a hack.
Earlier this year, he traveled to Dubai, from where he could easily have made his way, undetected, into countries where there are terror training camps, sources told The Post.
He traveled back to Bangladesh in September, law-enforcement sources said. He had no criminal record there or in the United States, authorities said.
Ullah is believed to have been recently working at a relative’s electrical company in Kensington and to have done electrical work with his brother near the PA terminal, CNN said.
He built the bomb from directions he found on al Qaeda’s online Inspire magazine, law-enforcement sources said.
He allegedly constructed the device in his parent’s apartment on East 48th Street in Flatlands, doing all his research on his cellphone, not a computer, the sources said, noting authorities have scoured the device.
He had been simmering about what he called “historic” atrocities committed against Muslims in the Mideast, according to the sources.
Authorities said he did not appear to have direct contact with ISIS but was radicalized online.
Neighbors said his relatives “always seemed like a nice family,” with his married brother “stylish, talkative’’ and “Americanized.”
“He a pretty normal guy. He’s a regular guy. He goes out to clubs, he smokes cigarettes,” George Sharrone, 48, said of the sibling.
The father, a retired business owner, “is a real gentleman’’ and the mother a “homemaker.’’ But Ullah was a different story. “He’s a hermit,’’ Sharrone said. Kat Mara, 63, who works at a real-estate company near the Flatlands home, agreed that Ullah was always “very aloof.” “Not even a hello,” she said. “I’ve never see him with anybody,’’ Mara recalled, adding that Ullah frequently passed by on his way to get coffee and bagels.
“He looked weird . . . always angry. He always seemed like he had something on his mind.”
Other neighbors recalled hearing loud fighting at the two-story home in the past few days, including a “big blow-up” Sunday night.
“There was a lot of screaming and yelling,’’ said Alan Butrico, 55, whose tenants live next door to Ullah, his parents and at least one brother and that brother’s wife and their young son.
Ullah lived with his parents on the first floor and his brother’s family upstairs.
A next-door neighbor, Kisslyn Joseph, 19, said that last week, “there was a bunch of noises — I just heard moving crates and stuff, but that was it.”
FBI agents and NYPD detectives with search warrants and bombsniffing dogs on Monday descended on the home, as well as an address on Ocean Parkway.
Albert Fox Cahn, legal director for the New York Chapter of the Council on Islamic Relations, read a statement from Ullah’s family outside the Ocean Parkway address:
“We are heartbroken by the violence that was targeted at our city today. But we’re also outraged by the behavior of the law-enforcement officials who held children as small as 4 years old out in the cold and who pulled a teenager out of high-school classes to interrogate him without a lawyer, without his parents.”
Ullah’s brother Ahsan worships at the same Jersey City mosque where infamous blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman once preached, law-enforcement sources told The Post. Ahsan Ullah was questioned by police but Akayed insisted his brother had no role in the attack, sources said.