BY PAUL SCHINDLER | Just hours after issuing an extraordinary cell phone alert, law enforcement officials captured 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami, who was wounded in a gun battle with authorities in Linden, New Jersey, according to the New York Times.
CNN is reporting that, according to the mayor of nearby Elizabeth, one police officer was shot in the hand and a bullet hit the protective vest of a second officer.
At 8 a.m. on Monday, officials issued a wanted alert via cell phone on the suspect, described as an Afghan-born US citizen.
Following the discovery of the pipe bombs in Elizabeth on Sunday evening, law enforcement raided a home in that New Jersey city, which is the last known home of Rahami. 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 Times, Rahami is believed to have links to those individuals.
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.
Authorities now believe the explosions in Chelsea and Seaside Park and the explosives discovered on West 27th Street and in Elizabeth are related.
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.
