US authorities are investigating whether anyone helped an Afghan-born American citizen charged with carrying out bombings in New York and New Jersey, while the city's top federal public defender asked for access to the man.
Police in New York City also said they had not yet been cleared to speak to Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, who was arrested on Monday after a gunfight with police in Linden, New Jersey.
He has been charged with wounding 31 people in a Saturday night bombing in New York that investigators regard as terrorism.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation released a photo of two men who found a second, unexploded bomb they say Rahami left in a piece of luggage in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday night.
The two men, who took the bag but left the bomb on the street, are not suspects, officials said, adding that investigators want to interview them as witnesses.
"As far as whether he's a lone actor, that's still the path we are following but we are keeping all the options open," William Sweeney, the FBI's assistant director in New York, said.
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, with New York up first.
Federal prosecutors portrayed Rahami, who came to the United States at age seven 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.
Prosecutors plan to move Rahami to New York in the near future, from the Newark, New Jersey hospital where he is being treated for wounds sustained in the gunfight, once his medical condition allows, said Preet Bharara, the US attorney in Manhattan.
Rahami's wife met with US law enforcement officials while in the United Arab Emirates and voluntarily gave a statement. She was not in custody, the official said.
Rahami's defense attorney, David Patton, on Wednesday asked for his first court appearance to be scheduled as soon as possible, even if it occurs in his hospital bed..
Rahami, in parts of a journal that prosecutors said he was carrying when he was arrested, praised "Brother" Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader slain in a 2011 US raid in Pakistan; Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric and leading al-Qaeda propagandist who was killed in a 2011 US drone strike in Yemen; and Nidal Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who shot dead 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.
Federal investigators were probing Rahami's history of travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and looking for any evidence that he may have picked up radical views or trained in bomb-making on those trips.
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