Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man suspected of placing bombs in New York and New Jersey last weekend, spent time in a religious seminary in Pakistan closely associated with the Afghan Taliban, according to a government official. Rahami spent three weeks in 2011 receiving “lectures and Islamic education” at the school in Kuchlak, a dusty cluster of villages 20km north of Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan, he said. It is home to many madrasas, the seminaries intimately linked with the Taliban, originally a movement of religious students. But very little information has emerged from inside Pakistan about what Rahami did during his visits. A western expert on the Taliban said Abdul Samad, the Afghan owner of the Kuchlack madrasa, was an important local figure.

Source: The Guardian September 23, 2016 14:48 UTC