New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo survey the site of an explosion which occurred Saturday night in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, U.S., September 18, 2016.
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“We just know there was a bombing”, Mayor Bill de Blasio said at briefing at New York Police Department’s headquarters.
He said the city has deployed 1,000 additional law enforcement officers to handle the aftermath and investigate the explosion, which left 29 people injured in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood.
“For all New Yorkers a central message we want to give today is to be vigilant”, said de Blasio, who spoke at a press conference Sunday afternoon along with NYPD, FDNY and Federal Bureau of Investigation authorities.
Authorities said the Manhattan blast didn’t appear to be connected to a pipe bomb explosion earlier Saturday in New Jersey that forced the cancellation of a charity run.
“We are going to have a lot more to say in the coming hours as we have more – a detailed analysis – but we believe at this point in time this was an intentional act, “De Blasio told reporters at a press conference Saturday”.
“We will find who planted these explosives and they will be punished”.
Police discovered a second bomb planted four blocks away, which was safely defused and is now being analyzed, officers said. And as of Sunday morning, authorities still had not determined the exact cause or motive of the Chelsea blast.
Authorities called the blast intentional but said there was no evidence of an global terror connection.
De Blasio told reporters early Sunday morning that there did not appear to be a link between the incidents in NY and New Jersey.
A law enforcement official tells The Associated Press that the second device discovered a few blocks from the scene appeared to be a pressure cooker attached to wiring and a cellphone.
Clinton was referring to a pipe bomb that exploded in a New Jersey shore town and reports of a shooting and the stabbings of eight people at a Minnesota mall. Such an intentional explosion in a public place was, however, “generically a terrorist activity”, the governor said. Apparently, the same type of explosive devices was used in the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
The explosion on West 23rd Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Chelsea was reported at around 8:30 p.m.
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said a NY arson and explosives task force had responded to the blast. “We’re not going to let them win”.
We will continue to update as more information becomes available.
This incident caps off an unusual weekend in the Northeast as an incendiary device exploded in New Jersey hours before the NY blast. One of the park’s maintenance men came in and said he got an alert on his phone that there was an explosion on 23rd and 6th.
Federal investigators in Quantico, Virginia, were examining evidence from the explosions in NY and New Jersey.
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NY lauds itself as the safest big city in the United States.
