What we know: Investigators found “some components indicative of an IED” at the explosion site, New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill said.
Advertisement
In New York, law enforcement officials and the mayor said that without knowing who’s responsible or what the motive was, it’s too soon to call the Saturday bombing a terror attack.
(Justin Lane/EPA via AP, Pool). The mayor warned that other explosions were expected.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and police in NY were still searching Monday for suspects and possible links between a bomb that exploded Saturday night in Manhattan and another found nearby.
According to J. Peter Donald, the man sought is Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio cautioned Sunday a lot of work remains to figure out the motivation behind the bombing.
New Jersey Transit service was suspended early on Monday between Newark Liberty Airport and Elizabeth, and New Jersey-bound Amtrak trains were being held at New York Penn Station, officials said.
“Today’s information suggests it may be foreign related, but we’ll see where it goes”, he said.
And investigators are looking at another suspicious device that was found blocks away from the NY explosion site: a pressure cooker with dark-colored wiring, according to law enforcement officials.
On Sunday night, FBI agents stopped “a vehicle of interest in the investigation” of the Manhattan explosion, according to FBI spokeswoman Kelly Langmesser.
She wouldn’t provide further details, but a government official and a law enforcement official who were briefed on the investigation told The Associated Press that five people in the vehicle were being questioned at an FBI building in Manhattan.
Langmesser said no one has been charged with any crime and the investigation is continuing.
But New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the act of blowing up a bomb in a crowded area of Manhattan “is obviously an act of terrorism”.
Officials told CNN explosives in both incidents apparently used cell phones as timers.
Authorities are questioning several people as they try to determine any possible connection between an explosion in a bustling New York City neighborhood, an unexploded pressure-cooker device found blocks away and a pipe bomb blast in New Jersey.
Clinton stressed that investigations were still underway, saying, “Law enforcement officials are working to identify who was behind the attacks in NY and New Jersey and we should give them the support they need to finish the job and bring those responsible to justice – we will not rest until that happens”.
The blast occurred on the same day an explosion went off near a Marine Corps charity run in New Jersey and a man stabbed nine people at a Minnesota mall. The New Jersey race was cancelled and no-one was injured.
An official told Fox News on Sunday that the bombs in New Jersey and NY were “from the same person” and the devices in both explosions included mobile phones.
On Sunday around 9:30 p.m., two men found the backpack in the garbage can and alerted police when they saw wires and a pipe, he said.
An FBI Bomb Squad arrived on scene and a robot was sent to examine the devices. No injuries were reported.
There was no immediate word on whether the devices were similar to those in nearby Seaside Park or New York City. On Sunday night, police blew up the device, rendering it safe. Some 135 heads of state or government are expected to attend the event, and city officials said they had bolstered an already heavy security force with 1,000 more uniformed police officers and National Guard members.
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev used homemade pressure cooker devices in the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, killing three people and injuring more than 250 more.
On Sunday, a team of five Federal Bureau of Investigation agents searched an Uber driver’s vehicle that had been damaged in the Manhattan blast, ripping off the door panels inside as they examined it for evidence.
As reports emerged of the five detained in NY, the FBI’s NY branch tweeted that no one had been charged.
Advertisement
Rudy Alcide, a nightclub bouncer, said: ‘It was extremely loud, nearly like thunder, but louder’. “This is a bomb”.
