Suspected New York City Bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami’s father caught him watching jihadi videos as far as back as 2012 and did not alert authorities until 2014.
Rahami’s father reportedly caught him watching the videos after returning from Pakistan in 2011. “Listen, if you watch this video in my home, please leave my house,” Rahami’s father reportedly told him, according to ABC News.
After getting kicked out of his father’s house, Rahami returned to Pakistan for nearly a year.
Already sympathetic to terrorist causes, Rahami fell in with a bad crowd of people in the Pakistani city of Quetta. Quetta is right across the border from Afghanistan, and is thought to harbor the entire high level leadership of the Taliban. Shortly after arriving, Rhami began attending a radical mosque with a Imam named Mullah Qudri.
“This Mullah Qudri has brainwashed Ahmad,” one of his relatives told The New York Times, using the term mullah to denote a religious scholar. Qudri reportedly spent so much time with Rahami that he would often sleep on his floor. By the end of Rahami’s trip, he was fully transformed into a cold-blooded murderer.
After his return in 2014, Rahami stabbed his brother, his sister, and his mother in the same domestic violence incident. In the wake of this incident, Rahami’s own father warned the FBI that his son was a “terrorist.” The FBI took note of the claims but closed the investigation after three weeks, when Rahami’s father recanted the claim. At no point did the FBI even interview Rahami.
Rahami’s father denied recanting the claim to the FBI, alleging to ABC News “They [did] not do their job.” After Rahami reneged on a business deal with his father, they had a falling out in May 2016, after which they no longer spoke despite living in the same house. Rahami’s mother left the country in June 2016, allegedly for dental work in Afghanistan.
Rahami took advantage of his mother’s absence by putting a lock on his bedroom door, and covering up his windows. The FBI criminal complaint against Rahami reveals he ordered all the components for his two pressure cooker bombs on eBay, and likely followed the same manual as Boston Bomber’s Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The manual the Tsarnaev brothers used is titled “Make A Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” The manual encourages would-be terrorists to use common household items, such as pressure cookers, to fashion maiming explosive devices packed with shrapnel. He deposited his homemade bombS near a charity race in New Jersey, and on the streets of New York City on a busy Saturday night.
The FBI’s special agent in charge noted that “injuries included lacerations to the face, abdomen, legs, and arms caused by flying glass, metal shrapnel, and fragmentation embedded in skin and bone.” The agent continued that the blast shattered windows 400 feet away from the detonation site, even breaking glass three stories up from the street.
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