A note found on the pressure cooker bomb left on 27th Street in Manhattan Saturday referenced Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born al-Qaida-linked cleric killed in a US drone strike in 2011, and the Boston Marathon bombings, a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation tells NBC News.
Advertisement
Police retrieved the device on Saturday night on West 27th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
NY police officials said that the pressure-cooker-type device found on 27th Street was first rendered safe at a Bronx facility.
In the kitchen, pressure cookers use an airtight lid to trap steam, which raises its cooking temperature to about 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius) – ideal for quickly cooking vegetables, meats or soup. Another unexploded pressure cooker was found nearby.
The brothers placed two pressure cookers outfitted as homemade bombs to explode near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The explosive device pierced the door panel of a sedan parked in Watertown, Mass. Next, nails, ball bearings or other shrapnel surround the explosive materials.
“Typically, these bombs are made by placing TNT or other explosives in a pressure cooker and attaching a blasting cap at the top”, the DHS said.
Federal officials say surveillance video shows a man believed to be Rahami at the scene of the Chelsea explosion and also at the scene where the pressure cooker device was left.
The blast would be partly directional, acting like a military “shape charge”, as the explosive force sought the path of least resistance and blew out at the lid of the pressure cooker.
The devices can be made with “readily available materials and can be as simple or complex as the builder decides”.
In a 2010 memo, Homeland Security said such rudimentary devices were used frequently in Afghanistan, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, and occasionally in the United States and Europe.
In New York City, the pressure cooker found reportedly had wires protruding and a cell phone attached with duct tape.
Three people died and almost 300 were injured. In Tsarnaev’s case, he attacked the Boston Marathon in April 2013 with his younger brother.
“It appears the motivations are the same”, said Edward F. Davis, who was Boston’s police commissioner at the time of the Marathon bombings.
Advertisement
Some of the various bombs found in NY and New Jersey this weekend were stumbled upon by amateur thieves who may have helped prevent their detonation, DNAinfo reports.
