Police Pursue Video Leads in Times Sq.
Police and federal agents on Sunday were reviewing surveillance footage that shows a possible suspect in the failed Times Square car bombing, describing him as a
white man in his 40s who was walking away from the area where the vehicle was parked, looking furtively over his shoulder and removing a layer of clothing, officials said.
Investigators were examining eight bags of an unknown, granular substance that was packed into a gun locker found in the vehicle, a dark green Nissan Pathfinder. A police bomb squad used an exploding charge to open the 75-pound locker on Sunday afternoon, discovering the substance and a metal pot containing a thicket of wires and M-88 firecrackers.
The substance, described by Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, as having the look and feel of fertilizer, raises the possibility that explosive materials were contained in the bomb, although Mr. Kelly said investigators are still describing the device as incendiary.
“We were lucky it didn’t detonate,” Mr. Kelly said at a news briefing on Sunday. “In my judgment, it would have caused casualties, a significant fireball. I’m told the vehicle itself would have been cut in half.”
Investigators have still not determined a motive in the failed attack, and Mr. Kelly said there was no evidence to support a claim of responsibility by a Pakistani Taliban group.
Federal authorities said the incident appeared to be an isolated one, and that there was no evidence of an ongoing threat to the city.
“We are treating it as if it could be a potential terrorist attack,” Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary, told CNN, one of several television appearances she made on Sunday morning. The bomb itself was not a sophisticated device, Ms. Napolitano said on ABC’s “This Week,” adding, “Right now, we have no evidence other than it is a one-off.”
The authorities said they are reviewing hundreds of hours of surveillance footage from the area, including images of the unidentified man captured by a tourist who was in Times Square on Saturday evening.
Officials also said they knew the name of the Pathfinder’s listed owner, but they declined to make the name public. The license plate on the rear of the Pathfinder was registered to a different vehicle, later located at a Connecticut repair shop.
A street vendor spotted smoke coming from the Pathfinder, which was parked on West 45th Street just off Broadway, around 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, prompting the evacuation of thousands of tourists and theatergoers from the iconic square on an unseasonably warm weekend night. A large swath of Midtown was closed for much of the evening and several hotels, including a portion of the Marriott Marquis, were evacuated; the streets and hotels have since reopened.
A bomb squad discovered several common incendiary materials inside the vehicle, including
three canisters of propane, similar to those used for barbecue grills, two red plastic five-gallon cans of gasoline, and a bag of consumer-grade M-88 firecrackers, along with the 55-inch tall gun locker.
The Pathfinder was towed by police to a forensic facility in Jamaica, Queens, where investigators are scouring it for fingerprints and other DNA evidence, such as skin cells, saliva, blood or hair follicles. No prints have yet been found, officials said, but the analysis is still in its early stages.
Consumer-grade fireworks, resembling a model known as M-80s, were found taped around the outside of the gasoline cans, according to several people briefed on the contents of the car. Two clocks with batteries, including one that resembled a child’s toy, were connected to the device by small wires.
Investigators believe that the
fuses on the firecrackers had been lit, but they did not explode, the people said. The burning fuses apparently ignited a portion of the car’s interior, causing a small fire that filled the inside of the car with smoke, one law enforcement official said.
Another official said that the popping noises heard by a firefighter as he approached the vehicle may have been made by the fireworks failing to fully detonate.
Investigators were reviewing similarities between the incident in Times Square and coordinated attacks in the summer of 2007 that targeted a Glasgow airport and a neighborhood in London of nightclubs and theaters. Both incidents involved cars containing propane and gasoline that did not explode. Those attacks, the authorities believed, had their roots in Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/nyregion/03timessquare.html?hp
