Morning Bell: Another Bullet Dodged in New York
Conn Carroll /
This past Saturday evening at 6:28 p.m., a white male in his 40s drove a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder into Times Square, parked, departed the vehicle, and slipped down a nearby alley. Within minutes a t-shirt street vendor alerted authorities about smoke emanating from the vehicle and, after pedestrians had been cleared from the area, a bomb squad discovered that the SUV was packed with what was intended to be lethal incendiary materials.
The device inside the SUV has since been described by investigators as “at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to explosives.” The large amounts of fertilizer surrounding the gas and propane tanks in the car was good for growing plants but bad for explosions; it was not the ammonium nitrate grade that can explode. Still if the propane and gas had ignited, the SUV would have exploded in half, spraying shrapnel with enough force to kill innocent pedestrians enjoying a warm summer evening in a busy Times Square.
On Sunday, the Pakistani Taliban posted a YouTube video created on April 30th claiming responsibility for the attack. But New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “So far, there is no evidence that any of this has anything to do with one of the recognized terrorist organizations,” and New York police Commissioner Ray Kelly noted that the same group had falsely taken credit for previous attacks on U.S. soil.