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U.S. might ban laptops on all flights into and out of the country

FILE PHOTO - A TSA worker loads suitcases at the checked luggage security screening station at Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, California, U.S. on September 7, 2011. REUTERS/Jonathan Alcorn/File Photo

By Toni Clarke

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States might ban laptops from aircraft cabins on all flights into and out of the country as part of a ramped-up effort to protect against potential security threats, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said on Sunday.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Kelly said the United States planned to “raise the bar” on airline security, including tightening screening of carry-on items.

“That’s the thing that they are obsessed with, the terrorists, the idea of knocking down an airplane in flight, particularly if it’s a U.S. carrier, particularly if it’s full of U.S. people.”

In March, the government imposed restrictions on large electronic devices in aircraft cabins on flights from 10 airports, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Turkey.

Kelly said the move would be part of a broader airline security effort to combat what he called “a real sophisticated threat.” He said no decision had been made as to the timing of any ban.

“We are still following the intelligence,” he said, “and are in the process of defining this, but we’re going to raise the bar generally speaking for aviation much higher than it is now.”

Airlines are concerned that a broad ban on laptops may erode customer demand. But none wants an incident aboard one of its airplanes.

“Whatever comes out, we’ll have to comply with,” Oscar Munoz, chief executive officer of United Airlines <UAL.N>, told the company’s annual meeting last week.

Airlines were blindsided in January when President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning entry for 90 days to citizens from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, sending airlines scrambling to determine who could board and who could not. The order was later blocked in the courts.

In the case of laptops, the administration is keeping the industry in the loop. Delta Air Lines <DAL.N> said in a statement it “continues to be in close contact with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” while Munoz applauded the administration for giving the company a “heads up.”

“We’ve had constant updates on the subject,” he said. “We know more than most. And again, if there’s a credible threat out there, we need to make sure we take the appropriate measures.”

MORE SCRUTINY OF CARRY-ONS

Among the enhanced security measures will likely be tighter screening of carry-on items to allow Transport Security Administration agents to discern problematic items in tightly stuffed bags.

Kelly said that in order to avoid paying fees for checking bags, people were stuffing them to the point where it was difficult to see through the clutter.

“The more stuff is in there, the less the TSA professionals that are looking at what’s in those bags through the monitors can tell what’s in them.”

The TSA has begun testing certain new procedures at a limited number of airports, requiring people to remove additional items from carry-on bags for separate screenings.

Asked whether the government would expand such measures nationwide, Kelly said: “We might, and likely will.”

(Reporting by Toni Clarke in Washington; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu in Washington, David French in New York and Alana Wise in Chicago; Editing by David Gregorio and Peter Cooney)

Accused New York, New Jersey bomber to be tried in New York

Ahmad Rahimi, 28, is shown in Union County, New Jersey, U.S. Prosecutor's Office photo released on September 19, 2016. Courtesy Union County Prosecutor's Office

By Brendan Pierson

NEW YORK (Reuters) – An Afghan-born man charged with setting off bombs in New York and New Jersey will be tried in New York after a federal judge rejected his lawyers’ argument that he could not get a fair trial in the city where he is accused of injuring 30 people.

At a hearing in Manhattan federal court on Monday, U.S. District Judge Richard Berman denied a motion to move the case against Ahmad Rahimi to another federal court, saying an impartial jury could be assembled in “one of the largest and most diverse districts in the country.”

Lawyers for Rahimi, a U.S. citizen, had proposed Vermont and Washington, D.C. as possible alternative venues.

Rahimi, 29, is facing federal and state charges in New York and New Jersey after authorities said he detonated bombs in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and in the coastal New Jersey town of Seaside Heights last September.

The bomb in New York injured 30 people but the explosion in New Jersey hurt no one.

According to prosecutors, Rahimi also left behind unexploded bombs in New York and in Elizabeth, New Jersey, before he was captured in Linden, New Jersey, following a shootout with police in which two officers suffered minor injuries.

In their motion to transfer the case, Rahimi’s lawyers argued that media coverage of the case would make it impossible to assemble an impartial jury. But Berman said Monday that robust questioning of potential jurors would be enough to ensure fairness.

Berman also noted that other high-profile cases had been tried in the Manhattan court before, including those of Mohammed Salameh and Ramzi Yousef, convicted of helping plan the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Sabrina Shroff, a lawyer for Rahimi, said after the hearing the motion could be renewed once questioning of potential jurors begins.

A judge in New Jersey state court, where Rahimi faces separate charges, has also refused to move the case.

Motions like Rahimi’s are rarely granted, even in high-profile cases. For example, federal judges refused to move the trial of the Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, despite massive pretrial media coverage.

(Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Tom Brown)

Warplanes drop incendiary bombs in Syria’s Idlib, Hama

People inspect the damage at a site hit by airstrikes in the rebel-held city of Idlib, Syria

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian or Russian warplanes dropped incendiary bombs on areas of Idlib and Hama provinces just days after a deadly gas attack in the region, activists and a monitoring group reported on Monday.

Moscow and the Syrian army were not immediately available for comment.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Russian jets had used an incendiary substance called thermite in bombs they dropped over the towns of Saraqeb in Idlib and al-Latamenah in Hama, further south, on Saturday and Sunday.

A rescue worker in Saraqeb said warplanes had dropped phosphorus bombs there, but he had not heard of the use of thermite. He said use of phosphorus was not a new development.

“It’s normal, these are often used,” said Laith Abdullah of the Syrian Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets, a rescue group working in rebel-held areas.

Videos posted on social media purportedly from Saraqeb on Sunday showed flaming materials hitting the ground and spreading large fires.

The Observatory said thermite had first been used in the Syrian conflict in June 2016 by the Syrian government.

The bombings came after the United States launched cruise missiles at an air base in western Syria on Friday. The missile strike was a response to what Washington said was a gas attack by Syrian warplanes in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in southern Idlib that killed scores.

Syria denies using chemical substances and denies it carried out the attack.

The Observatory reported Syrian warplanes took off from the same air base less than a day after the U.S. attack and carried out air strikes on rebel-held areas.

(Reporting by John Davison, editing by Larry King)

Man held after car speeds into Antwerp shopping street

Police officers stand next to a car which had entered the main pedestrianised shopping street in the city at high speed, in Antwerp, Belgium, 23 March 2017. Anouk Frankly/Twitter Handout via REUTERS

By Clement Rossignol

ANTWERP, Belgium (Reuters) – A man drove a car at speed into a pedestrianized street in Antwerp on Thursday, forcing people to jump out of its path, a day after an assailant rammed a vehicle into crowds in central London, police said.

The car sped away in the Belgian port leaving no one injured, but prosecutors said police later arrested a man suspected of being the driver, naming him as Mohamed R., a 39-year-old French national of North African origin.

Antwerp police found knives in the vehicle and a canister containing an unknown substance that bomb disposal officers were checking, Belgian federal prosecutors’ office said in a statement.

The Belgian federal prosecutors did not give details of any motive but said they had been called in “based on all these elements and the events in London yesterday”.

A French source later told Reuters that authorities there believed the suspect had not been trying to hit anyone, but was probably drunk and trying to escape a police check.

The source described the suspect as a Tunisian national living in France, known to police for common law crimes. There was no immediate comment on the source’s account from Belgium.

The car entered Antwerp’s busy De Meir shopping street at around 11 a.m. (1000 GMT), said police.

Patrolling soldiers tried to stop it but it went through a red light and drove off, said a police spokesman. The vehicle later came to a halt near Antwerp’s waterfront, it added without going into further details.

“I want to thank the fast response team which arrested the man in a professional manner and may have prevented much worse,” Antwerp mayor Bart De Wever said.

The London attacks came exactly one year after twin bombings at Brussels’ airport and its metro killed 32 people. More police were visible on the streets of Antwerp on Thursday afternoon.

The London attacker who killed three people near parliament before being shot dead was named on Thursday as British-born Khalid Masood, who was once investigated by MI5 intelligence officers over concerns about violent extremism.

(Reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek and Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by Robin Emmott and Andrew Heavens)

New York, wary after Europe attacks, tightens security for New Year’s Eve

Members of the New York Police Department's Counterterrorism Bureau patrol Times Square in the lead up to New Year's celebrations in Manhattan, New York City, U.S. December 29, 2016

By Hilary Russ

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York City will deploy sand-filled trucks and thousands of police officers as part of a beefed-up plan to protect revelers at this year’s New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square, mindful of two deadly truck attacks in Europe this year.

As many as 2 million people are expected to gather on Saturday to welcome the new year and authorities said on Thursday they were aware of no credible threat to the annual festivities at the famed Manhattan crossroads.

Even so, officials have redoubled efforts to prevent attacks like those in Germany and France this year in which suspected Islamic militants intentionally drove trucks into holiday crowds, killing dozens of civilians.

“People will be safe,” New York City Police Commissioner James O’Neill said at a news conference, aiming to allay any security concerns about the Times Square celebration, where a giant crystal ball will descend from a tower to mark the start of 2017.

“We’re going to have one of the most well-policed, best-protected events in one of the safest venues in the entire world given all the assets that we deploy here,” he said.

New York Police Chief of Department Carlos Gomez said the truck attacks in Europe were taken into consideration in planning New York’s security plan.

A truck attack at a holiday market in Berlin days before Christmas killed a dozen people and injured 56, while a similar incident in Nice, France, on Bastille Day this summer killed 86 people and injured more than 400.

Revelers in New York City on Saturday will find 65 large sanitation trucks filled with sand placed in strategic positions to block potential truck attacks, as well as about 100 other smaller “blocker” vehicles, officials said.

More than 80 sand trucks were used to protect the Macy’s 90th Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York after Islamic State militants abroad encouraged their followers to target the event, which drew an estimated 3.5 million people to the streets of the largest U.S. city.

For New Year’s Eve, the nearly 2 million visitors expected to gather in the hours before midnight may notice heavily armed police teams, bomb-sniffing dogs, helicopters and bag searches in subways. Coast Guard and police vessels will patrol the waterways surrounding Manhattan.

Officers also will make sweeps of area hotels, theaters and parking garages and monitor checkpoints where they scan for radiation and weapons, police said.

Other less visible layers of security include plainclothes officers, hundreds of security cameras, the removal of trash cans, sealed manhole covers and rooftop observation points.

All told, the New York Police Department has assigned nearly 7,000 police to Times Square and throughout the rest of the city on Saturday, officials said.

Umbrellas, large bags and alcohol are banned and portions of 57th and 59th streets will be closed to traffic.

(Reporting by Hilary Russ in New York; Editing by Frank McGurty and Bill Trott)

In Jordan hospital, mental trauma scars children blown apart by bombs

Rachid Jassam, 15, who nearly had his leg amputated after he was injured by an airstrike outside his house in Falluja, Iraq, sits on a hospital bed inside a Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Amman, Jordan

By Lin Taylor

AMMAN (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – As soon as the bombs exploded outside his house in the Iraqi town of Falluja, Rachid Jassam rushed onto the street to rescue the injured.

As the teenager ran out, another plane swooped overhead and dropped more bombs, the shrapnel tearing his right leg so severely local doctors wanted to amputate it.

His father refused the amputation to spare his son from a life of disability, and opted for basic surgery instead.

“When I got injured, I didn’t lose consciousness. I witnessed the whole thing when the people came and took me to the hospital. I remember everything,” 15-year-old Jassam said through an interpreter at a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital in Amman in Jordan.

“I lost five centimetres of my bone from my right leg and I couldn’t move it anymore.”

More than 20 per cent of all patients at the MSF hospital are children just like Rachid – blown apart, severely burnt and disfigured by conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Gaza.

Since it opened in 2006, the hospital has treated almost 4,400 patients free of charge, and remains the only hospital in the Middle East to perform advanced reconstructive surgery on victims of war.

But as conflicts rage across Middle East, hospital staff say resources have been stretched in recent years, with most patients coming from Syria and Yemen.

For Jassam, the clinic has been his lifeline. Sitting on his hospital bed in the Jordanian capital after receiving specialised surgery on his leg, he smiles broadly as he holds onto his crutches.

“Thank God, it’s God that preserved my leg.”

“YOU SEE WAR EVERY DAY”

Not all children are so lucky.

In a small pink room on the upper levels of the hospital, young girls with disfigured faces and missing limbs grow increasingly agitated as they try to solve puzzles and play board games.

“Sometimes the trauma affects their memory skills or problem-solving, and it also has psychological effects like low attention span. They can get frustrated easily and they have low self-esteem,” said occupational therapist Nour Al-Khaleeb, 24, who is part of a team of mental health specialists.

“You see war every day, you see their injuries, you see how it’s affecting their lives – and sometimes it has an effect on you too,” she said, talking loudly over the girls’ screams and chatter.

“Maybe they will remember that someone did something good for them, and this will give them hope later on in life.”

Around 60 people, mainly young men, undergo complex orthopaedic, facial and burn reconstructive surgery at the hospital each month, according to MSF. They also receive psychological care and counselling during their stay.

Mohammed, 11, said his family was fleeing the city of Homs in Syria by car when an airstrike hit, injuring him and his two brothers. He watched as his mother died in the explosion.

“A part of the bomb went into my leg and fractured my bone into pieces – it cut into my nerves and tendons,” he said through an interpreter, insisting he wasn’t scared when the bombs fell overhead.

Hobbling down the hospital corridor on crutches after a recent operation on his leg, Mohammed said he will get on with his life when he is discharged, and return to join his family in Jordan’s Zataari refugee camp, which hosts almost 80,000 Syrian refugees.

RESILIENCE

Clinical psychologist Elisa Birri, who heads the mental health team, said it was common for children in the hospital, especially boys, to put on a brave front.

But sooner or later, psychological symptoms like bedwetting, depression, anxiety, aggression and insomnia can crop up, said Birri. At the severe end of the spectrum, patients can experience flashbacks, panic attacks and disassociation, where they lose their sense of reality.

“Children show in their drawings and during free play what they have experienced, it’s like a mirror. For example, they will draw themselves playing with guns because of the war context they came from,” said Birri, adding that children will sometimes regress to an infantile state to cope with the trauma.

But having worked in Libya and Syria, the Italian psychologist added that the maturity and resilience of children living in war-torn countries were beyond their years.

“They go through really big events, but you see them smiling every day, playing every day. They never stop having motivation to go on.”

This rings true for 15-year-old Jassam. Even after being severely injured and besieged by Islamic State militants for eight months, Jassam said he can’t wait to return to Falluja once he leaves the hospital.

“I want to go back to Falluja, I miss it. I miss everyone there,” he said, smiling and nodding his head in excitement.

“I have a goat and it’s the only surviving goat and she has given birth, so there are babies waiting for me.”

(Reporting by Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers humanitarian issues, conflicts, global land and property rights, modern slavery and human trafficking, women’s rights, and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)

Iraqis desperate to return to homes rigged with bombs by Islamic State

A member of a demining team searches for landmines in Khazer, Iraq

By John Davison

BASHIQA, Iraq (Reuters) – Khedr Selim trod gingerly through the rubble of his old home, desperate to move back in with his family after two years on the run, but terrified in case Islamic State fighters, driven out at last, had wired the house to explode.

Just days earlier two former residents of his hometown Bashiqa visited their house for the first time since fleeing two years ago. They were killed by a bomb rigged to the front door.

“It’s dangerous here. The explosives need to be cleared from the town before we can even clean up the rubble, let alone come back to live,” he said.

“But we can’t stay away much longer. We’ve been renting elsewhere for two years and I haven’t found work. Money is running out and we need to get home.”

Thousands of Iraqis who fled when Islamic State swept through swathes of Iraq in 2014 are returning to homes as a U.S.-backed campaign to roll back the self-proclaimed caliphate has recaptured outlying towns and villages near the group’s biggest bastion, Mosul.

But in their desperation to return home, many villagers have been killed or maimed by mines and booby traps left behind by fighters as they withdrew.

Of the buildings left standing in Bashiqa, scene of heavy fighting and air strikes as U.S.-backed Kurdish forces seized it from Islamic State in October, several are marked with graffiti: “Danger – TNT”. Many streets are blocked off because they have not been cleared.

Not only are buildings booby trapped, mine clearers say minefields stretch for tens of kilometers (miles) to the southeast of Bashiqa, roughly along the former frontier of Islamic State-held areas.

In a village along that line in the Khazer area southeast of Mosul, dozens of yellow stakes hammered into the soil mark where mines have been cleared along a path leading right up to the local school.

“ISIS (Islamic State) decided to lay… a defensive minefield, but most of the minefields go through the houses,” said Salam Mohammed, whose team from the international Mines Advisory Group (MAG) is working to clear the explosives.

“At the same time, they booby-trapped the houses for when people tried to return later.”

Mohammed said MAG had so far found more than 350 explosive devices in that village alone, which was recaptured earlier in the year. Work on much bigger towns like Bashiqa has only just started.

DESIGNED TO KILL

The landmines, mostly large metal cylinders made in Islamic State’s bomb factories and weighing as much as 35 kg, were designed to kill, not to maim, he said. Of 25 civilian casualties from explosives in the Khazer area in recent months, 16 died.

Mohammed stood above a hole on the roadside where a resident had stepped on a mine.

“It turned him into three pieces. This is his boot,” he said, pointing at a black hiking shoe still lying on the ground.

The danger fails to deter some people from returning from exile, however.

“We knew the area was mined when we came back, but we’d been renting a house in Khabat (district) for nearly two years and have no money left,” said 73-year-old farmer Hamid Zorab.

“We’ve no choice.”

The family’s return several months ago came at a high cost. Zorab’s son was killed when a bomb detonated outside his house nearby.

Mine clearers are working as fast as they can to make safe areas Islamic State has been driven from, but do not know how much time it will take. They advise families to stay away but sometimes to no avail.

The force of a child’s footstep will set off most mines and the explosions can destroy a vehicle, Mohammed said.

His team detonated a device they could not defuse or remove. Smoke from the deafening blast shot up several meters into the air.

In a home in a still heavily mined village, MAG workers taught children to recognize unexploded ordnance and booby traps, which could take almost any form – a rigged fridge, a piece of pipe by the road, a toy.

Khalil Khobyar had moved back with his young family.

“The kids are becoming experts in explosives,” he said.

(Reporting by John Davison; editing by Peter Graff)

Air strikes pound rebel-held Aleppo districts

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Dozens of air strikes hit rebel-held areas of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo overnight, a monitor and defense worker said, continuing a fierce air campaign by Syrian government and allied forces since a ceasefire broke down almost a week ago.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said dozens of air strikes hit the rebel-held half of the divided city, the target of a fresh offensive announced by the Syrian army on Thursday.

Aleppo has become the main battle ground of a conflict now in its sixth year. Capturing rebel districts of Syria’s largest city, where more than 250,000 civilians are trapped, would mark the biggest victory of the civil war for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Bebars Mishal, a civil defense worker in rebel-held Aleppo, said the bombardment continued until 6 a.m. (0300 GMT).

“It’s the same situation. Especially at night, the bombardment intensifies, it becomes more violent, using all kinds of weapons, phosphorous and napalm and cluster bombs,” Mishal told Reuters.

“Now, there’s just the helicopter, and God only knows where it will bomb. God knows which building will collapse,” he said.

Another civil defense worker, Ismail al-Abdullah, said the overnight bombardment had been less intense than it had been in the past few days and the morning was relatively quiet.

The Observatory said it had documented the deaths of 237 people, including 38 children, from air strikes on Aleppo city and the surrounding countryside since last Monday when the ceasefire ended. Of those documented deaths, 162 were in rebel-held east Aleppo city.

Civil defense workers say about 400 people have died in the past week in the rebel-held parts of the city and surrounding countryside.

Rescue efforts have been severely hampered because bomb damage has made roads impassable and because civil defense centers and rescue equipment have been destroyed in raids.

Civil defense worker Ammar al Selmo said rescuers have only two fire trucks and three ambulances left in Aleppo and that three fire trucks, two ambulances and three vans had been hit in the past week.

“We are trying to respond … but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring,” Selmo said, speaking from Gaziantep, Turkey after recently leaving east Aleppo.

Brita Hagi Hassan, president of the city council for opposition-held Aleppo, said the bombardment over the past three days has been exceptional.

“The planes are not leaving the skies at all … Life in the city is paralyzed. Everyone is cooped up in their homes, sitting in the basements. These missiles are even targeting the basements and shelters that we’d set up to protect people,” he said from the Aleppo countryside. Hassan has been unable to get back into east Aleppo for several weeks because of the siege.

On Saturday a pumping station providing water for rebel-held eastern Aleppo was destroyed by bombing.

“People are now relying on water from the wells, and that water is not suitable for drinking. It was being used for other things, like washing, cleaning and so on. Now, the people are relying on it as drinking water,” Hassan said.

Selmo said eight people died on Monday in air strikes on east Aleppo and the surrounding countryside.

REBELS EVACUATED

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Syria’s civil war and 11 million driven from their homes.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. But it looks like there’s more killing, more bombardment, more blood on the horizon,” Hassan said.

In Homs, a second group of Syrian rebels began to be evacuated from their last foothold in the city on Monday, state news agency SANA said.

The Observatory said around 100 fighters were in the group scheduled to leave to the northern Homs countryside.

The first batch of around 120 fighters and their families left on Thursday. The evacuations are part of the Syrian government’s attempts to conclude local agreements with rebels in besieged areas that have resulted in rebels being given safe passage to insurgent-controlled areas.

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington and Ellen Francis; Editing by Dominic Evans)

Jets pound Aleppo’s rebel-held areas, defying U.S.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Warplanes mounted the heaviest air strikes in months against rebel-held districts of the city of Aleppo overnight, rebel officials and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Thursday.

There was no immediate comment from the Syrian military on the reports, or mention of Aleppo air strikes on state media.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry demanded on Wednesday that Russia and the Syrian government immediately halt flights over Syrian battle zones, in what he called a last chance to salvage a collapsing ceasefire and find a way “out of the carnage”.

“It was the heaviest air strikes for months inside Aleppo city. It was very intense. In that area we didn’t see heavy fighting recently,” said Observatory Director Rami Abdulrahman.

Zakaria Malahifji, head of the Aleppo-based Fastaqim rebel faction’s political office, said it was the most intense bombardment since April. “There is no weapon they didn’t use,” he said, speaking to Reuters from Turkey.

A senior official in the Levant Front, another Aleppo-based rebel group, also said it was the most intense bombardment in many months. There were 15 raids alone targeting two areas where his group had a presence, he added.

The rebel officials said weapons used included incendiary bombs. “This is a type of pressure on the opposition. The Russians only want surrender. They have no other solution,” the Levant Front official said.

Much of the recent fighting in the Aleppo area has been in a district of military colleges and industrial sites on its southwestern outskirts, rather than inside the city itself.

(Reporting by Tom Perry and Angus McDowall; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Larry King and Pravin Char)

Investigators try to determine if accused New York bomber had help

By David Ingram and Nate Raymond

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. authorities on Wednesday were looking into whether an Afghan-born American citizen charged with carrying out bombings in New York and New Jersey acted alone or had help as the city’s top federal public defender sought access to the suspect.

Police in New York City said they had not yet been permitted by doctors to speak to Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, who was arrested on Monday after being wounded in a gunfight with police in Linden, New Jersey.

Rahami has been charged with wounding 31 people in a bombing in New York on Saturday that authorities called a “terrorist act.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released a photo of two men who found a second, unexploded pressure cooker device 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 improvised bomb on the street are not suspects, officials said, but 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, told reporters.

Rahami is also charged with planting a bomb that exploded in Seaside Park, New Jersey, but did not injure anyone and planting explosive devices in his hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, which did not detonate. He faces charges from federal prosecutors in both states.

Federal prosecutors portray Rahami, who came to the United States at age 7 and became a naturalized citizen, as embracing militant Islamic views, begging for martyrdom and expressing outrage at the U.S. “slaughter” of Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Palestine.

Investigators were also probing Rahami’s history of travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and looking for evidence that he may have picked up radical views or trained in bomb-making.

Both government and pro-Taliban sources in Pakistan on Wednesday said they had no knowledge of Rahami having met with prominent people connected to the Taliban or other religious groups.

Prosecutors plan to move Rahami to New York from the New Jersey hospital where he is being treated as soon as his medical condition allows, said Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan.

DEFENSE LAWYER DEMANDS COURT APPEARANCE

Rahami’s wife met with U.S. law enforcement officials while in the United Arab Emirates and voluntarily gave a statement, a law enforcement official said on Wednesday. She was not in custody.

A New Jersey U.S. congressman previously said Rahami had emailed his office in 2014 for help in getting her a visa to enter the United States from Pakistan when she was pregnant.

Rahami’s defense attorney, David Patton, on Wednesday demanded that his first court appearance to be scheduled as soon as possible, even if it occurs in his hospital bed, saying that the defendant had a constitutional right to a lawyer and a court appearance within two days of his arrest.

New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill told a news conference that investigators had not yet received doctors’ clearance to interview Rahami, adding, “That may happen in the next 24 hours, pending the doctors’ approval.”

Federal prosecutors in New York noted that while they had filed charges against Rahami, he remained in the custody of state officials in New Jersey, who initially arrested him after Monday’s gunfight. They said that makes Patton’s request for access premature.

Patton, in a subsequent filing, shot back that such delays were unacceptable.

“Mr. Rahami was arrested more than 48 hours ago. His bail in New Jersey was set without any appointment of counsel or court appearance. He still has not been provided counsel. He does not have a scheduled court appearance in New Jersey until next week,” Patton said.

The attacks in New York and New Jersey were the latest in a series in the United States inspired by Islamic militant groups including al Qaeda and Islamic State. A pair of 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 this weekend’s attacks.

Rahami, in other 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 U.S. raid in Pakistan; Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric and leading al Qaeda propagandist who was killed in a 2011 U.S. drone strike in Yemen; and Nidal Hasan, the U.S. Army psychiatrist who shot dead 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, house Homeland Security Committee chairman, told CNN that Rahami’s writings in a journal showed that his actions had been inspired by Islamic State as “his guidance came from the lead ISIS spokesman.”

“What that tells me as a counterterrorism expert that now we can definitively say this was an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack.”

(Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu and Julia Edwards in Washington and Mehreen Zahra-Malik in Quetta, Pakistan; Writing by Scott Malone and Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Will Dunham and Alan Crosby)

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