The blast, in the Chelsea area of Manhattan, injured 29 people.
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Officials solicited tips from the public, telling reporters at a news conference in the New York Police Department’s headquarters that they didn’t know who set off the bomb or why.
The men were heading over the Verrazano Bridge that goes from Staten Island to Brooklyn, believed to be headed to the airport. Terrorism, she said, generally has political or religious motives behind it.
FBI investigators were to examine remnants of the bomb plus an unexploded device found four blocks away and another device that exploded about 130 km away in New Jersey on Saturday to see if they were connected, Cuomo said.
And on Sunday night, five explosive devices were found near an Elizabeth, New Jersey, train station.
An explosion rocked a bustling Manhattan neighborhood Saturday night and an unexploded pressure-cooker device was found blocks away; there was a pipe bomb blast earlier Saturday in a New Jersey shore town; and five explosive devices were found near a New Jersey train station late Sunday.
Twenty-nine people were injured in the blast that occurred on West 23rd Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues at about 8:30 p.m. Saturday night. “I want to assure all New Yorkers that the NYPD and all other agencies are at full alert”.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said a bomb exploding in New York “is obviously an act of terrorism” but said there was now no evidence that an worldwide terrorist group such as so-called Islamic State was responsible.
A pair of MA brothers used pressure-cooker bombs to kill three people and wound more than 260 in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. “We better get very, very tough”. “This was an intentional act, but we do not know the motivation”. He said a second device found blocks away from the bombing appeared “similar in design” to the first.
He said the Union County bomb squad’s robotic device indicated the package could be a live bomb, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state police will decide how to remove the device. Meanwhile, all of the injured have been released from local hospitals.
An additional 1,000 state troopers and members of the National Guard were placed at transit hubs and other points throughout New York City and extra police officials were patrolling Manhattan, officials said.
Senior law enforcement officials also said that they were increasingly focused on the possibility that the attack was connected to a bombing that took place 11 hours earlier in New Jersey, but the authorities still needed to compare all the bombs before drawing any conclusions.
President Barack Obama, who was attending a congressional dinner in Washington, “has been apprised of the explosion in New York City, the cause of which remains under investigation”, a White House official said. But we have a lot more work to do to be able to say what kind of motivation was behind this. The New Jersey device contained evidence of a black powder explosive. “A forensic examination of the device and its components will be conducted at the FBI Laboratory at Quantico, Virginia”. As I was leaving the park, I saw a smoke cloud hovering in that area. He spotted a woman with a metal fragment in her eye saying, “I can’t see”.
But the three devices planted in the area came just days before world leaders descend on NY for a meeting of the United Nations general assembly.
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“Almost anybody could have fabricated these bombs and used cellphones as timed detonators”, said another U.S. official familiar with the inquiry.
