A suspicious device found in a trash can near a train station exploded early Monday as a bomb squad was attempting to disarm it with a robot, officials said.
Advertisement
New York’s emergency management department says New Jersey-bound Amtrak trains are being held at New York’s Penn Station, interrupting some service on the busy Northeast Corridor.
Law enforcement had been examining a device near the Elizabeth train station.
Police had already been investigating a Manhattan bombing, a Minnesota mass stabbing and a New Jersey pipe bomb blast.
Bollwage told CBS News the explosion was unintentional.
The Chelsea blast followed a pipe bomb explosion on Saturday morning along the route of a running race in the New Jersey beach town of Seaside Park.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the investigation was focusing on a person of interest in the case.
Another device in the form of a pressure cooker was found blocks away from the scene of the NY bombing.
There has been no claim for the bombings in Manhattan or New Jersey, but a jihadist-linked news agency claimed that an IS “soldier” carried out the Minnesota stabbing.
Officials said it didn’t appear that those two incidents were connected, though they weren’t ruling anything out.
New Jersey Transit says service has been suspended between Newark Liberty Airport and Elizabeth.
In Minnesota, FBI agent Rick Thornton confirmed that federal agents were investigating the stabbing as “a potential act of terrorism”, as local media identified the suspect as a 22-year-old Somali-American. Elizabeth Mayor Christian Bollwage said the device exploded shortly after 12:30 a.m. Monday.
Police found out that the two men had handled the device only when they looked at surveillance video. The pressure cooker later was found by state police troopers after a similar device exploded nearby, injuring 29 people.
According to mayor Chris Bollwage by way of ABC News, the two men spotted the backpack in a trash can at 8:47 p.m. and removed it, thinking that there might have been something valuable inside.
Advertisement
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said it was clearly “an act of terrorism”, although it hadn’t been linked to an global terrorist group.
