NEW YORK — A federal jury Monday convicted Ahmad Khan Rahimi, a loner from New Jersey drawn to online calls to jihad, of setting the explosives in the Chelsea neighborhood that blew out windows and sent shrapnel flying into buildings, cars and people during a two-day bombing campaign in and around New York City last year.
The conviction of Rahimi, 29, marked the end of a prosecution of what was, arguably, the largest-scale terrorist act in New York since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The verdict came after dozens of FBI agents, police bomb-squad detectives, computer analysts and technicians presented evidence over eight days. They had sorted through a blocklong field of debris on West 23rd Street and feeds from dozens of video cameras in the days after the Sept. 17, 2016, explosion, searching for clues.
Jurors also heard from those wounded that night by shrapnel from a bomb specifically designed to hurt people. No one was killed, a remarkable stroke of good fortune when the magnitude of the explosion became clearer. It blew out windows and doors and threw a heavy trash bin across a street six lanes wide. The mangled metal container was rolled out for inspection by jurors hearing the trial.
Rahimi carried multiple bombs — nine in all — but most did not explode. The first was set early that morning in a garbage can at the finish line of a U.S. Marine Corps charity race in Seaside Park, New Jersey. The race's start time was delayed, however, and no one was hurt when the bomb exploded. That night, a blast occurred in Chelsea. A short time later, passers-by found a bomb on West 27th Street that was disarmed by the police bomb squad. The next day, Rahimi left six pipe bombs in a backpack at an Elizabeth, New Jersey, train station. They carried fuses, not timers, and did not explode until a bomb-squad robot detonated one later.
Rahimi was identified by his fingerprints and DNA on the unexploded devices and debris from the bombs. Video from cameras along the length of his journey from Penn Station in Manhattan, where he arrived from New Jersey that Saturday evening with his bombs, to West 23rd and West 27th streets, were played for jurors over several days. Unhurried, his face without expression, Rahimi walked along the city's sidewalks, pulling a rolling suitcase with each hand. He left one on West 23rd, the other on West 27th.
The first exploded about 8:30 p.m. Camera after camera on the block showed smiling pedestrians, until a white blast of light filled the air. On the videos, the same pedestrians fled, their hands over their ears.
Later that night, on 27th Street, two men saw a suitcase on the sidewalk. One bent to open it, removing whatever was wrapped in a plastic bag — it was a pressure cooker with a cellphone detonator attached, packed with shrapnel. They took the empty suitcase. A neighbor passed, noticed the device and, rattled by the nearby explosion, called police.