NEW  YORK – The man accused of last month’s
bombings in New York and New Jersey that injured dozens of people made his
first court appearance on Thursday from a hospital bed, pleading not guilty to
attempting to murder police officers.

Ahmad Khan Rahimi, 28, whose last
name had previously been reported as Rahami, appeared via live video on a
television screen in a courtroom in Elizabeth, New Jersey, from the hospital
where he has been recovering from gunshot wounds suffered during a shootout
with police.

With his court-appointed lawyer,
Peter Liguori, standing bedside in hospital scrubs, Rahimi lay still with a
blanket pulled up to his neck during the hearing.

Rahimi, said by U.S. authorities
to have been inspired by radial jihadism, spoke in a quiet voice, answering
“yes” to several questions from Union County Superior Court Judge
Regina Caulfield about whether he understood the charges and wished Liguori to
represent him.

Liguori told the judge that his
client’s last name was spelled “Rahimi.”

The hearing, which lasted only a
few minutes, concerned state charges against him stemming from a gunfight with
police on Sept. 19, after an officer discovered him sleeping in the doorway of
a bar.

Rahimi, a U.S. citizen born in
Afghanistan, is also facing federal charges of using weapons of mass
destruction and bombing a place of public use in New York and New Jersey.

He is accused of setting off an
explosive in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood that injured 31 people as well as
a pipe bomb near a charity running race in a New Jersey shore town on Sept. 17.

In addition, Rahimi is charged
with planting another pressure-cooker bomb in Chelsea that did not go off and
with leaving several devices at a train station in Elizabeth, just blocks from
the courthouse where he appeared on video on Thursday.

One of those explosives detonated
when a bomb squad robot attempted to defuse it. None of the blasts killed
anyone.

It remains unclear when Rahimi
will appear in federal court, but it is likely he will face charges there
before New Jersey’s state case proceeds to trial.

The hearing had been delayed
while Rahimi, who was unconscious for weeks, recovered from his injuries. Two
officers suffered injuries in the shootout, and at least one of them attended
the hearing on Thursday.