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Port Authority bomber charged with terrorism; family ‘outraged’ over investigation – Metro US

Port Authority bomber charged with terrorism; family ‘outraged’ over investigation

akayed ullah, nyc terror attack, nyc pipe bomb, nyc explosion

Akayed Ullah, the man who injured himself and three others when his homemade pipe bomb detonated in a busy Times Square subway station, is now facing terrorism charges, officials said Tuesday.

Ullah’s improvised explosive device went off around 7:20 a.m. Monday in an underground passageway that connects the Times Square subway station to Port Authority. The blast brought the city to a standstill just as the morning rush hour was getting underway.

The 27-year-old Brooklyn resident, who is Bangladeshi and came to the U.S. in 2011 on a family immigrant visa, was charged Tuesday morning with criminal possession of a weapon, supporting an act of terrorism and making a terroristic threat, the NYPD said. 

Ullah, who is being treated at Bellevue Hospital for burns and cuts to his hands and stomach from the explosion, was expected to be arraigned Tuesday, law enforcement sources told the New York Daily News.

A man named Akayed Ullah previously held a “For-Hire Vehicle” license from the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission from 2012 to 2015, the TLC said, but not a license to work as a taxi driver.

Ullah lived in the Flatlands neighborhood of Brooklyn, and authorities were investigating his home there as well as an address in the Kensington section of the borough that is associated with the suspect.

Members of Ullah’s family said in a statement through the Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York (CAIR-NY) Monday night that they are “heartbroken” by the attack and “the allegations being made against our family,” The Washington Post reported.

The statement also indicated that the family was “outraged by the behavior of law enforcement” during the investigation, writing that children as young as 4 were “held out in the cold, detained as their parents were questioned” and that a teenage boy was taken out of his high school and questioned without his lawyer or parents present.

“These are not the actions that we expect from our justice system,” the statement said.