The suspect was a 28-year-old Afghan-born naturalized American citizen, and it took social media less than a day to track him down.
Police say Ahmad Khan Rahami was cornered by police in Linden, New Jersey, after state and federal law enforcement turned to Facebook, Twitter and even the dating site Tinder to blast out a picture of the suspect once he was identified.
What drove the suspect to detonate a pressure-cooker bomb in the heart of Manhattan late Saturday and place bombs apparently at three other locations remains a source of intense scrutiny.
Federal authorities are still scrambling to determine whether the attacks were acts of international terrorism. After the shootout that led to his arrest Monday morning, state and local law enforcement provided little details on the ongoing investigation into Mr. Rahami’s alleged role in the bombings or what possible ties to militant jihadi groups he may have had prior to the attacks. The bombings are the first major attacks of its kind since the 2013 Boston Marathon attacks, which ended with three dead and over 250 wounded.
As federal investigators continue to piece together the chain of events that led to this weekend’s attacks, striking parallels have begun to emerge between Mr. Rahami’s case and the Boston attack, one of the first, high-profile “lone wolf” attacks — strikes carried out by self-radicalized jihadi operatives with what appear to be only weak formal ties to established extremist organizations.
Details on the suspect were quickly emerging: Mr. Rahami was born in Afghanistan in 1988 but became a naturalized U.S. citizen when his parents emigrated to Elizabeth, New Jersey in the 1990s. He traveled back to the native country in 2014, a trip that has acquired major significance in the early investigation of the attacks.
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Before that trip, customers to the First American Fried Chicken takeout restaurant run by Mr. Rahami’s family told the New York Post that the suspect spoke unaccented English and had an affinity for souped-up Honda Civics, not religious radicalism. His family had clashed with Elizabeth city officials over the operation of the restaurant, at one point even filing a federal lawsuit against the city alleging harassment by city officials because they were Muslims.
But investigators say the suspect was not on any U.S. government terror watch or “no-fly” lists.
Mohammad Rahami, Mr. Rahami’s father, insisted to MSNBC Monday he had “no idea” what his son was planning. Asked for his reaction, the elder Rahami said “my heart is very, very …,” before trailing off.
Neighbors on Monday told reporters that Mr. Rahami was generally a quiet young man, a 2007 graduate of nearby Edison High School.
“He was very quiet,” Jorge Vasquez, a nearby business owner who frequented the family restaurant, told The Associated Press.
But upon his return to the U.S. from the 2014 trip to Afghanistan, friends say he traded in his Western-styled clothes for traditional Afghan garb, grew a full beard and became more outwardly devout.
“It’s like he was a completely different person,” childhood friend Flee Jones told reporters.
“He was more quiet and more mature,” Mr. Jones recalled. “I said, ’Oh, where have you been?’ And he said, ’Oh, vacation.’ But I knew he went to Afghanistan because his little brother said it. “
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon attacks, also reportedly became radicalized after a trip to Russia’s South Ossetia, a hotbed of Islamic extremism, a year before the bombings. Tsarnaev, a first-generation U.S. citizen of Chechen parents, was killed in a shootout with law enforcement in Massachusetts during the ensuring manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers.
The device Mr. Rahami reportedly detonated in the New York neighborhood of Chelsea, a homemade bomb constructed from a pressure cooker, was the same type of device used by Tsarnaev and his younger brother in the Boston attacks.
Mr. Rahami’s arrest comes three months after Omar Sediqqi Mateen, a 29-year-old Afghan-American, opened fire at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 50 and wounding 50 more in an attack he claimed was in the name of Islamic State.
• This article was based in part on wire service reports.
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