Ahmad Khan Rahami’s wife arrested in UAE as radicalized past becoming clearer
Authorities investigating the New York and New Jersey bomb attacks by Ahmad Khan Rahami offered vague remarks regarding the man “having been radicalized” and confirmed that his Pakistani wife was detained in the UAE after fleeing the states.
Rahami, 28, was captured on Monday in a gunfight which left two police officers injured after they responded to a tip that Rahami (a man described the description circulated by police) was hiding at a Linden bar.
Ahmad Khan Rahami
“At that time, Rahami immediately produced a handgun and shot the officer in the torso, striking him in his protective vest,” prosecutors said in a statement.
“Additional patrol officers responding to the scene engaged Rahami in an exchange of gunfire that ended when Rahami was shot multiple times outside of an auto repair shop on East Elizabeth Avenue, several blocks west of where he was initially approached.”
The police officer shot in the vest and an officer who was hit in the head with a bullet fragment were not seriously injured.
Nicknamed “Mad” was taken away by stretcher after being shot in the leg, forearm and shoulder during the shootout with police.
“There is no other individual that we are looking for at this time … but vigilance is called for,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
Rahami appears to be a one-man operation, having made and planted the bombs himself, says a source, confirming other details by various news outlets. He is a naturalized U.S. citizen, had made at least three months-long trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan in recent years.
The source is still not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly, but stated that Rahami had married a Pakistani woman and brought her to the U.S. as his wife. She left the U.S. for Pakistan recently and was intercepted by officials Monday in the United Arab Emirates, where investigators were attempting to determine whether she had been aware of her husband’s plans.
Rahami had come to the United States as a small child with his parents, who were seeking asylum from Afghanistan’s war. Since 2002, the family ran a popular restaurant, First American Fried Chicken, in Elizabeth, N.J., a working-class suburb of New York.
Friends and neighbors described him as having the normal passions of the young men of his neighborhood — fast cars and rap music — at least until his travels abroad, when he seemed to become more pious.
“At one point he left to go to Afghanistan, and two years ago he came back, popped up out of nowhere and he was real religious,” Flee Jones, 27, a friend, told the Boston Herald. “And it was shocking. I’m trying to understand what’s going on. I’ve never seen him like this.”
