New Jersey: A video footage capturing the moment an explosion rocked the New Jersey station after a robot assigned by police cut the wrong wire, has surfaced online.
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Investigators believe more people were involved in the NY and New Jersey bombing plots, two US officials told Reuters.
The FBI office in Newark, on Twitter, said, “There was a suspicious package with multiple improvised explosive devices this evening at the Elizabeth Train Station in NJ”.
Investigators didn’t immediately say whether they thought the Elizabeth incident was connected to the blast in NY.
A New Jersey mayor says one of five devices found in a backpack near a train station has exploded while a bomb squad robot was attempting to disarm it. Also Saturday, a pipe bomb exploded about an hour from the Elizabeth train station in Seaside Park, New Jersey. Authorities then focused their attention on a building at Elmore and Linden Avenues, with a business and apartments above it, that is tied to 28-year-old Ahmad Rahami, the man who was later arrested in connection with the Chelsea and Seaside Park bombings. The FBI was working to disarm the other four devices.
The discovery of the bombs led to a shutdown of NJ Transit’s Northeast Corridor and the North Jersey Coast Line as they were examined and the immediate area searched for additional devices.
Elizabeth Mayor Christian Bollwage said that the device exploded shortly after 12:30 a.m. Monday. Bollwage said to expect more detonations. The men took it around the corner thinking there was something of value in it, but notified police when they saw wires and a pipe inside the bag.
A call came into Elizabeth authorities at 8:47 p.m. after two men found a suspicious backpack in a garbage can, mayor Chris Bollwage said in a press conference. “Bomb techs from the FBI, Union County, and the New Jersey State Police have arrived on the scene and are now rendering the area safe”, the FBI said in a statement. “The other devices, I don’t know what the Federal Bureau of Investigation and State Police are doing at this moment, but they are trying to remove them in a secure way so they can preserve them for evidence”. It wasn’t immediately known if the blast was part of a controlled explosion.
Authorities have identified a suspect in the Manhattan explosion case as a 28-year-old New Jersey resident of Afghan descent who may be armed and unsafe, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday.
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Bollwage said that he wasn’t willing to say that Elizabeth had become a target and that it was possible that someone anxious about the authorities was trying to get rid of the package.
