WASHINGTON _ Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man suspected of planting a series of bombs in New York and New Jersey over the weekend, praised Anwar al-Awlaki in handwritten notes found on his person after he was wounded in a shootout Monday.
FBI agents recovered a notebook from Rahami after he was wounded by police in Linden, N.J., a U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau.
In the notebook, Rahami describes his affinity for al-Awlaki, the American-born Islamic cleric who became a leader of al-Qaida in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was killed in a CIA drone strike in 2011, but his legacy has spread among jihadists thanks to online audio and video sermons.
The notebook also contained ramblings about the Boston Marathon bombers, the official said.
Speaking to reporters in front of his home Tuesday, the suspect's father, Mohammad R. Rahami, said he had contacted the FBI in 2014 to express concerns that his son might become a terrorist.
"Two years, I called the FBI _ my son, he's doing very bad, OK?" he said. "But they check it almost two months. ... They say, 'He's not a terrorist.' I said, 'OK.' Now they say he is a terrorist. I say, 'OK.' " He added that Ahmad stabbed his brother two years ago "for no reason."
A U.S. official confirmed that the elder Rahami spoke to local police two years ago about his son. Local police then reported the concerns to the bureau and opened its most basic kind of preliminary investigation into Ahmad.
The report came about the same time that Ahmad was arrested on charges of stabbing and beating a relative in what has been described as a domestic dispute. It was the only complaint received by the FBI about him, the official said.
Agents found no ties to terrorism in Ahmad's background or in bureau files. They also did not uncover any "derogatory" information in terrorism-related databases run by other federal agencies, the official said.
FBI agents questioned the father, who said he believed his son met with unsavory characters in his trips home to Afghanistan and to Pakistan. However, the father also recanted his earlier complaints to local authorities that he thought his son was a terrorist, a U.S. official said.
With no other leads to pursue, FBI agents closed the matter.
Congressman Albio Sires, who represents the district, said Ahmad Rahami had been in contact with his office in 2014, asking for help securing a visa for his Pakistani wife. He said the request was complicated by the fact that her passport had expired and that by the time she replaced it, she was 35 weeks' pregnant.
"He showed up at my office. The staff thought he was a little abrupt,'' Sires said. "But there was nothing unusual about it. This district has a lot of immigrants. We do this all the time."
Rahami, 28, was born in Afghanistan and came to the United States with his parents in the mid-1990s. He later became a naturalized U.S. citizen, the official said.
He is believed to have traveled to Afghanistan through Pakistan at least three times for monthslong visits from 2005 to 2014, the official said. He had married a Pakistani woman and brought her to the U.S. as his wife, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.
The woman left the U.S. for Pakistan in recent days 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.
Authorities also were trying to determine whether Rahami had contact with foreign terrorist groups such as al-Qaida or Islamic State. For now, they said, it appears that Rahami was a one-man operation _ a prolific one, having made and planted the bombs himself.
Rahami's arrest Monday came as a result of an extraordinarily intense manhunt that began Saturday morning after a small pipe bomb exploded in Seaside Heights, N.J., near the route of a Marine charity run. No one was injured. Then about 8:30 p.m. Saturday, a bomb exploded in a dumpster in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, spewing shrapnel and broken glass over the street and causing 29 minor injuries.
Surveillance video from the area of that bombing provided the first real clue, showing a chubby, bearded man carrying a duffel bag. A few hours later, a sharp-eyed photographer who lives nearby discovered an unexploded bomb fashioned from a pressure cooker near her front door. A fingerprint lifted from the pressure cooker helped lead police to Rahami.
Perhaps the most remarkable development came Sunday night. Two homeless men who were hanging out near the train station in Elizabeth, N.J., noticed a backpack left on top of a garbage can. When they opened it, hoping to find valuables, they saw it contained pipes and wires. They alerted the police, who came and discovered five more homemade bombs inside, one of which was detonated by a robot.
By 4 a.m. Monday, police cars and helicopters had descended on the Rahamis' restaurant. The suspect, however, was nowhere to be found. So they took an unprecedented step: They sent out an emergency bulletin to millions of cellphones in New York and New Jersey, asking the public to keep a lookout.
Within hours, an apparently exhausted Rahami was discovered sleeping in the vestibule of a tavern in Linden, a few miles from his home.
"I saw him on the corner with a handgun," Peter Bilinskas, who owns a business nearby, said in a phone interview. "He did not appear to be running. He was actually standing at the corner, holding the gun. At first, I thought he was a policeman. Then he started shooting at a police car."
Video from the scene showed Rahami, conscious but stunned with wounds to his shoulder and leg, strapped to a gurney and loaded into an ambulance.
The Rahami family's neighbors expressed shock at the arrest. "It seemed like they were just hustling to make money. It didn't seem like they were up to anything," said William Ferrera, 65, a neighbor.
"His dad is a nice guy. They seem like regular people," said Enoch Ojo, 26, who lives down the block. "I'm just in disbelief that someone so dangerous could be living so close to us."
