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Bomb suspect could face charges from hospital bed
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AN Afghan-born US citizen charged with bombings in New York and New Jersey may make his first court appearance from his hospital bed after his lawyer requested a hearing “without delay.”
Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, was arrested on Monday after a gunfight with police in Linden, New Jersey. He is receiving treatment for his wounds at a hospital in Newark, New Jersey, where he could formally face charges if he cannot travel to the US District Court in Manhattan, his lawyer said.
“He has been held and questioned by federal law enforcement agents since his arrest,” David Patton, head of the New York City federal public defenders office, said in a court filing. “The Sixth Amendment requires that he be given access to counsel on the federal charges, and that he be presented without delay.”
Patton has asked to meet with Rahami. Police have said they had not yet been able to interview the suspect.
Federal prosecutors said Rahami injured 31 people in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood with a homemade bomb that detonated on Saturday night in a case law enforcement authorities now regard as terrorism.
Rahami is also charged with planting bombs that went off in Seaside Park, New Jersey, and his hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, but did not injure anyone. He faces charges from federal prosecutors in both states.
“Inshallah (God willing), the sounds of bombs will be heard in the streets,” Rahami wrote in a journal he was carrying when arrested, according to prosecutors. “Gun shots to your police. Death to your oppression.”
Federal prosecutors portrayed Rahami, who came to the United States at the age of 7 and became a naturalized citizen, as embracing militant Islamic views, begging for martyrdom and expressing outrage at the US “slaughter” of Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Palestine.
Rahami, in other parts of his journal, praised “Brother” Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader killed in a 2011 US raid in Pakistan; Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric and leading al-Qaida propagandist killed in a 2011 US drone strike in Yemen; and Nidal Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who shot dead 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.
The weekend attacks were the latest in a series in the United States inspired by militant groups including al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. Two ethnic Chechen brothers killed three people and injured more than 260 at the 2013 Boston Marathon with homemade pressure-cooker bombs similar to those used in the latest attacks.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted last year for his role in the Boston attacks and sentenced to death, also first faced charges in his hospital bed while he was still recovering from injuries sustained in a gunfight with police.
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