Ny, nj suspect visited Afghanistan,pakistan

Ahmad Khan Rahami, a 28-year-old Afghanistan-born American, was taken into custody on Monday morning following a shootout with police in the New Jersey town of Linden. Officers had been alerted by a bar owner who discovered a man sleeping in the doorway of his premises and thought he was a vagrant.

Rahami shot and injured two police officers, and he was himself shot several times before he was detained, taken to a local hospital and dispatched for surgery. The injuries of the New Jersey officers were not serious.

As New York prepared to host leaders from around the world attending the UN General Assembly, a portrait of the suspect emerged as a man whose attitude and outlook had changed, and darkened, over the last couple of years. Local media said the man who lived and worked with his parents above a fried chicken shop, had grown a beard and started wearing traditional Muslim clothes, after a series of visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

CNN said Rahami travelled to Afghanistan multiple times, according to law enforcement sources. He was questioned every time he returned to the United States, as is standard procedure, but was not on the radar as someone who might have been radicalised.

It said that Rahami travelled to the Afghan city of Kandahar and to the Pakistani city of Quetta. Quetta is a stronghold of Islamic extremists, but also home to a large popoulation of Afghan refugees.