Police Hunt for Ahmad Khan Rahami in Connection With Manhattan Bombing

The invesitgation is in full swing this morning. The bombings in New York and New Jersey and the unexploded bombs near the Elizabeth train station are all related. The suspect being searched for is Afghani and there are five more suspects in custody who were evidently beating feet to the airport. NYTimes:

The police are searching for a 28-year-old man, described as a naturalized citizen of Afghan descent, Ahmad Khan Rahami, in connection with the bombing in Manhattan on Saturday night, sending out a cellphone alert to millions of residents.

“I want to be very clear that this individual could be armed and dangerous,” Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said on Monday morning. “Anyone seeing him should call 911 immediately.”

Mr. de Blasio would not go into detail about why Mr. Khan was wanted, but he said finding him was critical to the safety of the city.

“What we do know is we need to get this guy right away,” he said.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who had said on Sunday that the attack did not appear to have a link to international terrorism, said new evidence might change that thinking.

“I would not be surprised if we did have a foreign connection to the act,” he said on CNN on Monday morning.

Mr. Rahami was born on January 23, 1988, in Afghanistan. His last known address was in Elizabeth, N.J. He is described as about 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs about 200 pounds. Mr. Rahami has brown hair, brown eyes and brown facial hair.

Hours before his name was released, the police discovered five pipe bombs near a train station in Elizabeth, detonating one of them overnight as they sought to disarm them. Before dawn, agents conducted a series of raids in the New Jersey city.

F.B.I. agents with dogs and Elizabeth police officers swarmed a residential neighborhood of low-rise apartment buildings, multiple family homes and small businesses.

In a separate appearance, Mr. de Blasio said New Yorkers should be prepared to see a large increase in police presence across the city.

“In the coming hours we are going to be able to say a lot more about what happened here,” Mr. de Blasio said during an interview on the show “Good Morning America.” “It is certainly leaning more in the direction that this was a specific act of terror.”

Late on Sunday night, the police stopped a car on the Belt Parkway near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and questioned five people who were connected to Mr. Rahami.

There was heightened police activity on both sides of the Hudson River overnight, as the police responded to reports and chased down leads, including the tip that led to the discovery of the pipe bombs in Elizabeth.

Two men walked out of Hector’s Place Restaurant near the city’s train station and found a backpack containing five explosives resting atop a municipal garbage can, Mayor J. Christian Bollwage said.

After finding that the backpack contained “wires and a pipe,” the mayor said, the men dropped the item in the street and contacted the Elizabeth Police Department around 8:45 p.m. The police, in turn, called the Union County bomb squad, and the investigation was quickly turned over to the F.B.I. and the New Jersey State Police, Mr. Bollwage said.

The F.B.I. then sent in a pair of robots and determined that the backpack held five bombs, some of which were pipe bombs, the mayor said.

Around 12:30 a.m., the robots tried to clip a wire to disarm one bomb and accidentally detonated it, the mayor said.

“As a robot was trying to disarm one of the devices, it exploded,” he said. No injuries were reported.

The mayor said around 3 a.m. Monday that one robot was destroyed and another had a mechanical arm blown off.

It was not yet known whether the backpack found here had any connection to a bomb that injured 29 people in Manhattan on Saturday night, or to a bomb nearby that failed to detonate, or to a bomb that went off Saturday morning in Seaside Park, N.J., without injuring anybody.

As federal and county agents scoured the elevated tracks and platforms for anything else suspicious, Elizabeth police officers checked all municipal garbage cans.

Police cars and yellow tape blocked every car and pedestrian route to the station early Monday morning. The city was eerily calm but for the flickering of red-and-blue police lights on the buildings downtown.