Pipe Bombs Found Near Train Station in Elizabeth, N.J.

ELIZABETH, N.J. — The bomb drama that rattled the New York region over the weekend arrived here on Sunday night when two men walked out of Hector’s Place Restaurant near the city’s train station and found a backpack containing five explosives resting atop a municipal garbage can, Mayor J. Christian Bollwage said.

After finding that the backpack contained “wires and a pipe,” the mayor said, the men dropped the item in the street and contacted the Elizabeth Police Department around 8:45 p.m. The police, in turn, called the Union County bomb squad, and the investigation was quickly turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New Jersey State Police, Mr. Bollwage said.

The F.B.I. then sent in a pair of robots and determined that the backpack held five bombs, some of which were pipe bombs, the mayor said.

Around 12:30 a.m. on Monday, the robots tried to clip a wire to disarm one bomb and accidentally detonated it, Mr. Bollwage said. No injuries were reported.

He said around 3 a.m. on Monday that one robot was destroyed and another had a mechanical arm blown off.

Later on Monday, the authorities arrested Ahmad Khan Rahami, a 28-year-old man described as a naturalized citizen of Afghan descent, in connection with the bombings here; in Seaside Park, N.J., on Saturday morning; and in Manhattan on Saturday night. Mr. Rahami’s last known address was in Elizabeth, and the police and federal agents searched homes and businesses in the Union County city.

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Mr. Rahami was wounded around 11 a.m. in a shootout with the police in neighboring Linden, then taken to University Hospital in Newark.

Earlier, federal and Union County agents scoured the elevated tracks and train platforms in Elizabeth for anything else suspicious, and Elizabeth police officers checked all municipal garbage cans.

Police cars and yellow tape blocked every car and pedestrian route to the station. The city was eerily calm but for the flickering of red-and-blue police lights on the buildings downtown.

Dean Fage, 49, was walking past police cars and officers at the station in Elizabeth when the bomb went off.

“People were screaming; a woman yelled, ‘What the hell was that?’” he said. “I felt it in my chest. I thought when they find bombs they take them and detonate them somewhere else.”

As of 3:30 a.m. on Monday, F.B.I. agents were still working to envelop the four remaining bombs in blastproof material so they could be preserved for evidence. They were to be taken to the Middlesex County Fire Academy, where they would be picked up by federal agents who would take them to the F.B.I. lab in Quantico, Va.

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F.B.I. agents worked through the early morning to document where the debris from the exploded bomb had landed. It was on the street level, which meant the train tracks above were not affected, Mr. Bollwage said.

The men who initially found the backpack were not suspects, Mr. Bollwage said. Thinking that it contained valuables, they had carried it perhaps 1,000 feet before becoming exhausted by its weight. They set it down where their muscles gave out, beside a sport utility vehicle under the New Jersey Transit overpass on Broad Street at the station downtown, Mr. Bollwage said.

Law enforcement officials were examining surveillance video from the cameras of the bar near where the backpack was found. The mayor said that the area had been searched and that no other such packages had been found.

He said he did not think that Elizabeth had necessarily been targeted by an attacker.

“It is very possible that someone was trying to get rid of a package, as opposed to setting it off,” Mr. Bollwage said.

All New Jersey Transit and Amtrak trains going through Elizabeth were delayed on Monday.

Mr. Bollwage said that he was worried on behalf of the residents in the community where the bomb was found, but that his fears extended beyond the city that he governs.

He said he was “extremely concerned for everybody in the state and the country, where somebody can go and drop a backpack into a garbage can that has multiple explosives in it.”

“You have to wonder how many people could have been hurt,” Mr. Bollwage added. “I could imagine if all five of them went off at the same time, the loss of life could have been tremendous.”