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Last October, a little over a year after he was arrested following a shootout, bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami was convicted for transporting and setting explosives for use as weapons of mass destruction after carrying out a bombing campaign in New York and New Jersey that left several people injured. After returning to federal court on Tuesday, Rahami received two life sentences.
Rahami, an Afgahn immigrant, worked in his family’s fast-food restaurant, before deciding to build a series of bomb from household goods, including the one responsible for the initial blast:
On Sept. 17, 2016, Mr. Rahimi traveled to Manhattan from his home in Elizabeth, N.J. pulling suitcases on rollers with each hand. He went on to place a homemade bomb — packed into a pressure cooker and wired to a flip-phone detonator — on a stretch of the Chelsea neighborhood’s West 23rd Street, busy with pedestrians on a warm Saturday night. The blast from that device sent glass and shrapnel flying and launched a construction waste container across the street. More than 30 people were injured, and they described that night in testimony at Mr. Rahimi’s trial.
A second bomb, planted blocks away, was discovered by a shaken passer-by of the initial blast, and police took the device away without incident. A third bomb, planted at the finish line of a U.S. Marine Corps charity race in New Jersey, went off without harming anyone because the start of the race had been delayed. Rahami also left a backpack containing six pipe bombs in a New Jersey train station, but police dealt with that without incident as well.
According to prosecutors, Rahami was radicalized by jihad-leaning websites while living in the U.S.
(Via New York Times)