NY, NJ bombings echo past plots

A bomb plot in New York and New Jersey look eerily similar to previous cases, top lawmakers said, suggesting that they fit into a pattern.

“The case looks a lot like the Tsarnaev case of the Boston Marathon bombing,” Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

{mosads}In the Boston marathon attacks of 2013, brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev planted homemade bombs made from pressure cookers along the race route, killing three people and injuring scores more. Like Ahmad Khan Rahami, the 28-year-old accused of planting the weekend bombs in New York and New Jersey, the Tsarnaev brothers were born overseas but moved to the U.S. and obtained or sought citizenship.

Both appeared to be caught between the U.S. and their home countries and traveled back and forth before carrying out their plots.

Rahami, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, is believed to have traveled to his birth country and Pakistan in recent years. He also married a Pakistani woman and reportedly underwent a change in personality.

“Very similar in the sense that we’re trying to find out if there were foreign connections, where was he radicalized during that travel — many of the identical questions we had about Tsarnaev,” said Schiff.

Rahami was arrested on Monday after a shootout with police near his hometown in New Jersey. He is accused of being behind explosions in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and at a charity race in Seaside Park, N.J., as well as other planted bombs that did not go off in New York City and Elizabeth, N.J.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, noted that the bombs allegedly planted by Rahami bear a striking resemblance to the pressure cooker models advertised by Islamic extremists.  

“I can tell you this, that the pressure cookers look like they were matched out of ‘Inspire’ magazine, which by the way was an al Qaeda publication,” Burr said on Fox News “Special Report” on Monday evening.

The suspect had “legitimate” reasons for traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Burr noted, without ruling out the possibility that there were also other motivations.

“Let this investigation continue,” he said.