NY TIMES
The man who the police said sowed terror across two states, setting off bombs in Manhattan and on the Jersey Shore and touching off a furious manhunt, was tracked down on Monday morning sleeping in the dank doorway of a neighborhood bar and taken into custody after being wounded in a gun battle with officers.
The frenzied end came on a rain-soaked street in Linden, N.J., four hours after the 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.
Mr. 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 that no evidence had yet been uncovered that he had received military training abroad.
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| The Rahami family’s restaurant in Elizabeth, N.J. Bryan Anselm for The New York Times |
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The weekend began with what seemed like an odd and troubling event, but one that hardly aroused widespread alarm.
At 9:30 a.m., three pipe bombs tied together blew apart a trash can just before the scheduled start of a Marine Corps run called Seaside Semper Five in Seaside Park, N.J.
Only one of the three bombs had detonated and no one was injured. The F.B.I. was brought in to investigate, but there was no indication about what would unfold 11 hours later.
Investigators believe that Mr. Rahami drove a car registered to his father into New York City 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 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 tip to 911 led the police to a second device, the other pressure cooker bomb with a cellphone attached, four blocks to the north. Surveillance video collected by investigators would later show Mr. 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 Mr. Rahami as the man who left the bag behind. The unexploded bomb found on West 27th Street 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 Mr. Rahami.
Roughly 20 minutes after Mr. Rahami left the bag on West 27th Street, two men happened upon the luggage, apparently unaware of its explosive contents. One of the men opened the bag, pulled out the bomb, which was inside a white plastic bag, and then left with the luggage. The authorities, who are eager to talk to the men, said that their handling of the device may have disabled it.
By Sunday, the authorities were monitoring addresses associated with Mr. 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 Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in Brooklyn. Five people inside, some of them Mr. Rahami’s relatives, were questioned and later released.
Later on Sunday night, the police received a report of a suspicious package near a train station in Elizabeth, N.J.
The F.B.I., which responded, deployed a pair of robots to examine the bag and determined that it held five bombs, some of which were pipe bombs.
The location of the bag was not far from where the Rahami family ran a restaurant. Before dawn on 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 Mr. Rahami was reported to have spent time.
As investigators realized that all of the attacks were linked and that the bombs reflected a certain level of sophistication, they worried that the bomber would grow desperate and do something even more drastic.
They decided to take the unprecedented measure of using New York City’s emergency notification system — typically for major weather events — to alert people in the region that a dangerous suspect was on the loose. Shortly after 7 a.m., millions of people in the region received the notification to be on the lookout for Mr. Rahami.
Even as the police scoured the area near the restaurant, Mr. Rahami was seeking shelter from the morning rain under a doorway of a bar, Merdie’s Tavern in Linden, which is next to Elizabeth, trying to catch some sleep.
Around 10:30 a.m. the owner of the bar spotted a man sleeping in the doorway, officials said.
Capt. James Sarnicki of the Linden Police Department told reporters that an officer approached the man, later identified as Mr. 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, Captain 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. Mr. Rahami fled, “indiscriminately firing his weapon at passing vehicles.”
Other officers joined the chase, and Mr. Rahami was shot multiple times. At least one other officer was wounded during the confrontation