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The
discoveries of the devices, which the city's chief
counterterrorism officer called "rice cookers that could be
mistaken for pressure cookers," raised concern because of the
latter's previous use as makeshift bombs in New York and Boston.
Surveillance video shows a dark-haired man in his 20s or 30s
with a shopping cart placing the devices at two locations inside
the busy downtown Fulton Street subway station, said John
Miller, the New York Police Department's deputy commissioner of
intelligence and counterterrorism.
"Because of the timing and the placement and items we're
carrying this right now as a hoax device," Miller told reporters
at the scene. "That's the investigative category."
The unidentified man is "not a suspect but certainly someone
we'd want to interview," he said. Police posted two photographs
on social media of the cookers at Fulton Street.
Officials said they had not determined whether the discovery
about an hour later of a third implement resembling a pressure
cooker next to a garbage can on a street corner in the borough's
Chelsea neighborhood was related, Miller said.
Miller noted that in September 2016 the so-called "Chelsea
Bomber," Ahmad Khan Rahimi, wounded 30 people using a device
made from a pressure cooker and a cellphone timer that exploded
on Manhattan's West 23rd Street. Another pressure cooker bomb
was left nearby but did not explode.
Rahimi was sentenced last year to life in prison.
There was also an explosion in Midtown Manhattan in December
2017 when a Bangladeshi man, Akayed Ullah, detonated a homemade
bomb in a pedestrian tunnel connecting two subway lines and a
bus terminal. Three people were wounded.
Pressure cookers were turned into bombs by a pair of ethnic
Chechen brothers when they killed three people and injured more
than 200 at the 2013 Boston Marathon.
The discoveries, which were first reported at about 7 a.m. EDT
(1100 GMT) created havoc for thousands of motorists and
commuters on the numerous subway lines that converge at Fulton
Street as police and bomb squad vehicles swarmed to the scene.
Even after police deemed the devices harmless at the Fulton
Street station complex, which is close to the World Trade
Center, officials warned of residual delays for commuters.
(Reporting by Peter Szekely; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Steve
Orlofsky)
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