BY PAUL SCHINDLER | Thirty-six hours after an explosive device injured 29 people on West 23 Street and an unexploded pressure cooker bomb was found on West 27th Street, police have issued a wanted alert regarding 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami in connection with the Chelsea incidents as well as the discovery of pipe bombs left in a backpack near a train station in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Rahami is described as an 5’ 6”, 200-pound, Afghan-born US citizen, with brown eyes, brown hair, and brown facial hair, whose last known address is Elizabeth.
Mayor Bill de Blasio warned Rahami could be “armed and dangerous.”
“Anyone seeing him should call 911 immediately,” the mayor said.
Following the discovery of the pipe bombs in Elizabeth on Sunday evening, law enforcement raided a home in that New Jersey city. Earlier on Sunday, a car was stopped by police on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and the driver and its four passengers were detained for questioning. According to the New York Times, Rahami is believed to have links to those individuals.
The FBI confirmed that the car was stopped because it was a “vehicle of interest.”
On Saturday morning, an improvised device exploded near a garbage can at the beach in Seaside Park, New Jersey, just before the scheduled start of a five-kilometer race to raise funds for Marines and their families.
Separately, the FBI has labeled the Saturday evening stabbing of nine people in a shopping mall in Minnesota as a “potential act of terrorism.” The day after the attack, a news agency with links to the Islamic State called the attacker, who was shot dead by an off-duty police office, a “soldier of the Islamic State.”
CNN reported that sources identified the stabber, who was dressed as a private security guard, as 22-year-old Dahir A. Adan. The news network identified its sources as two leaders in Minnesota’s Somali-American community.
As with the Chelsea and Seaside Park explosions, there were no fatalities in Minnesota aside from the assailant.
