NEW YORK — A man sought by police in connection with bombings in New York and New Jersey on Saturday is in custody following what has been described as a shootout with police.
Law enforcement officials said Ahmad Rahami, 28, was detained in Linden, New Jersey, late Monday morning.
Authorities have been searching for suspects linked to four explosives-related incidents in the last 48 hours, including a blast Saturday night that injured 29 people in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
Local and federal police announced their search for Rahami early Monday. Police say Rahami, a U.S. citizen of Afghan descent, was last known to live in Elizabeth, New Jersey, about 6 km from where he was detained in Linden. Local media reports say his family ran a restaurant there on the first floor of their home.[xyz-ihs snippet=”adsense-body-ad”]The FBI said Rahami is wanted for questioning in the Chelsea explosion, which happened around 8:30 p.m. Saturday, as well as in another bombing hours earlier in Seaside Park, New Jersey, about 135 kilometers south of New York City. Explosives detonated in a trash bin there just before the start of a 5-kilometer foot race. No one was hurt in that blast.
The FBI and police in New York have also been searching for possible links between the Saturday blast in Chelsea and another explosive device found a few blocks away that did not detonate. The second device, recovered a short time after the first went off, involved a pressure cooker with a cell phone attached to it. Police safely removed it from the area and said Sunday they blew it up in a controlled explosion.
Yet more devices were found late Sunday in a backpack in a trash can at a train station in Elizabeth, located just outside New York. Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage said one of the devices exploded as police tried to disarm it with a robot. The incident briefly disrupted train service throughout the region, along one of the country’s busiest rail corridors.
Chelsea blast
On Monday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reiterated that the Chelsea bombing was an “act for terrorism,” and said there may be a “foreign link,” despite his claim on Sunday that were was no connection to “international terrorism.”
Authorities stopped a “vehicle of interest” on a highway in the Brooklyn section of New York late Sunday, and the FBI said it questioned five people inside, but that no one had been charged with any crime.
All 29 people wounded in the Chelsea blast have been released from the hospital.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival Donald Trump tweeted about the attacks Monday.
FBI technicians are examining evidence from both of the New York bombs at a lab near Washington.
Tom Sanderson, director of the Transnational Threats Program at the Washington-based Centers for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told VOA he expects investigators will learn a good amount from those tests.
“Someone’s DNA is going to be on some component of that pressure cooker bomb,” Sanderson said.
Many questions remain
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio cautioned Sunday a lot of work remains to figure out the motivation behind the bombing.
“Was it a political motivation, a personal motivation, what was it? We do not know that yet,” he told reporters.
New York Governor Cuomo said an extra 1,000 police and National Guard troops would patrol the New York subway system as a precaution during a week that is especially busy for New York, with hundreds of world leaders and dignitaries visiting this week for the U.N. General Assembly.
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told VOA that officials assess security needs inside the U.N. complex on a daily basis.
“Outside of the gates, we are in the hands of the host country, at the federal and local levels,” he said. “We appreciate their work and, no doubt, they are doing their utmost to keep everyone safe,” he added.
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