Who is Akayed Ullah, the suspect in Port Authority explosion terror attack?

An explosion Monday at New York’s Port Authority subway station involved a Bangladeshi man inspired by ISIS, New York police say.

A pipe bomb strapped to the suspect, identified as 27-year-old Akayed Ullah, went off in the New York City subway near Times Square on Monday morning, law enforcement officials said, injuring four, including the bomber.

They say Ullah meant to set off the bomb, which was attached to his body with velcro and zip ties, but it’s not clear if he meant to do so in a passageway in the Times Square area where it went off Monday during the morning rush hour.

Ullah is in police custody with burns to his abdomen and hands. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital.

Officials said Ullah was inspired by the Islamic State but appeared to have no direct contact with the group. Ullah came to the U.S. about seven years ago and lives in Brooklyn, law enforcement officials told The Daily Beast.

A spokesman for the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission said he was a licensed cab driver from March 2012 to March 2015, reported NBC News. The network said police were searching three Brooklyn addresses associated with Ullah, but neighbors of his parents in the Old Mill Basin neighborhood – one of the homes being searched – said he had recently been living there.

“The family is very friendly, very nice, but he was quiet,” one neighbor told the network. “Never talked to anyone, stayed to himself.”

Ullah told police he built the device at his workplace, police told CNN.com.

A Bangladesh police chief told Reuters that Ullah had no criminal record there and had last visited Bangladesh in September.

A tweet surfaced Monday morning claiming that ISIS threatened to attack New York City this Christmas season in a poster.

Speaking earlier on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Bill Bratton, former New York Police Department commissioner, also attributed the explosion to terrorism.

“The preliminary information from police sources, and I emphasize the word preliminary, subject to change, it is a man in his middle 20s probably, possibly somebody from Bangladesh, been in the country about seven years, who supposedly was setting the device off in the name of ISIS,” Bratton said. “So definitely a terrorist attack.”

“This is New York,” said Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “We are a target.”

Cuomo called an explosion in one of New York’s subways “one of our worst nightmares.”

New York City police say they are combing through video of the bombing in the subway system as part of the investigation.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story was originally published December 11, 2017 at 6:40 AM with the headline "Who is Akayed Ullah, the suspect in Port Authority explosion terror attack?."