A device found in a backpack near a train station in New Jersey exploded early Monday while a bomb squad robot was trying to disarm it, authorities said.
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“We conducted a traffic stop of a vehicle of interest in New York City but no arrests were made and no one has been charged with any crime”, Federal Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Kelly Langmesser told Reuters news agency by telephone. “No one has been charged with any crime”.
Investigators at the FBI’s lab in Quantico, Virginia, were set to look to see if the three devices in the NY area had a common design, although a USA official familiar with the inquiry said that would not be proof in itself the attacks were linked.
Police are also studying video surveillance from an area four blocks away from the blast – where an unexploded pressure-cooker bomb was discovered.
Shortly before 9 p.m. Sunday, the FBI and NY police stopped a vehicle of interest in the investigation, according to a statement from FBI. A pressure cooker device was also found blocks away, but it didn’t explode.
And a manhunt is under way for 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami after NY police identified him as wanted in connection with the bombing Saturday night in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, which wounded 29 people.
At least 29 people were injured after a bomb exploded under a dumpster on 23rd Street in the Chelsea section of Manhattan Saturday. Officials said the explosive in that device appeared to be black powder.
Authorities have not drawn any connection between the violence in Minnesota and the bombings in the NY area.
Late Sunday, more suspicious devices were found near a train station in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
“They’re not in any jeopardy of being arrested”, Jim Watters, chief of the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism unit, said on Wednesday.
“We are the No. 1 target in the world”, O’Neill said.
But he said that, as yet, no worldwide organisation such as so-called Islamic State had claimed they were behind it.
He was expected to comment Monday afternoon after a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi (HY’-dahr ahl ah-BAH’-dee) on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in NY.
Police suspect Rahami was also behind a bomb that exploded in a New Jersey beach town on Saturday, as well as leaving the device found on the sidewalk after the NY blast. All those injured were released from area hospitals by Sunday morning, according to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office.
The Chelsea explosion left many rattled in a city that had marked the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks only a week earlier and that was schedule to hold a United Nations meeting Monday to address the refugee crisis in Syria.
“Whatever the cause”, De Blasio said, “New Yorkers will not be intimidated”.
More than two dozen people were hurt in an explosion in the NY neighborhood of Chelsea Saturday night.
The incident appears to have been “an intentional act” however not connected to a terrorist group, with no immediate claim of responsibility according to De Blasio.
“I must tell you that just before I got off the plane a bomb went off in NY and nobody knows what’s going on”, Trump said.
The off-duty police officer who shot and killed a man suspected of stabbing nine people in a Minnesota mall is being hailed by authorities as a hero.
In a similar incident on Sunday night, a device exploded near a train station in New Jersey as an Federal Bureau of Investigation bomb squad was attempting to disarm it with a robot.
The explosion occurred around 8:30 p.m.
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We did a traffic stop of a vehicle of interest in the investigation. He said the investigation is ongoing, and he “wouldn’t be surprised if it zeroes in on a particular individual, today even”, and he “wouldn’t be surprised if we found a foreign connection to the act”.
