Times Square Bomb Scare

NEW YORK, N.Y.— There is yet no evidence of a Taliban link to a failed bomb found in a smoking SUV parked in Times Square, a major tourist destination, the police commissioner said Sunday.

However, IntelCenter, a monitoring group that keeps track of militant media messages, said the Pakistani Taliban has released a video — apparently on April 4 — of their leader promising an attack on major U.S. cities “in some days or a month.”

The video was the second message purportedly from the militant network that has been discovered following the attempted Times Square bombing. It does not specifically mention that attack.

IntelCenter said Monday the 9-minute video appears credible.

Meanwhile, police were preparing to talk to a man who said he may have recorded a bombing suspect in a nearby alley.

The video apparently shows a white man in his 40s taking off his shirt in the alley and putting it in a bag, Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

Police found the SUV parked on one of the prime blocks for Broadway shows after being alerted by two street vendors Saturday night. Thousands of tourists were cleared from the streets for 10 hours, and the bomb was dismantled. No one was injured.

The SUV contained three propane tanks, fireworks, two filled 19-litre gasoline containers and two clocks with batteries, electrical wire and other components, police said. Timers were connected to a can filled with fireworks that were apparently intended to set the gas cans afire, then ignite the three barbecue-sized propane tanks.

Kelly said it was “the intent of whoever did this to cause mayhem, create casualties.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the explosive device “amateurish” but potentially deadly.

Police also found eight bags of an unknown substance in a gun locker in the SUV,that was in the smoking SUV, Kelly said. The substance “looks and feels” like fertilizer, he said, but tests were pending.

A T-shirt vendor and a handbag vendor, both Vietnam War veterans, alerted police at about 6:30 p.m. Saturday, the height of dinner hour before theatregoers head to Saturday night shows.

Handbag vendor Duane Jackson, 58, said he noticed the car and wondered who had left it there.

“That was my first thought: Who sat this car here?” Jackson said.

Jackson said he looked in the car and saw keys in the ignition with 19 or 20 keys on a ring. He said he alerted a passingofficer.

They were looking in the car “when the smoke started coming out and then we heard the little ‘pop pop pop’ like firecrackers going out and that’s when everybody scattered and ran back,” he said.

“Now that I saw the propane tanks and the gasoline, what if that would have ignited?” Jackson said.

Connecticut licence plates on the vehicle did not match up, and police had interviewed the Connecticut car owner, who told them he had sent the plates to a nearby junkyard, Bloomberg said.

Heavily armed police and emergency vehicles shut down the city’s busiest streets. Times Square lies about four traffic-choked kilometres north of where terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, then laid waste to it on Sept. 11, 2001.

In the latest Pakistani Taliban video, militant chief Hakimullah Mehsud says he is speaking in April, which would bolster recent reports that he did not die in a U.S. missile strike in January.

In another video, the Pakistani Taliban says the Times Square attack is revenge for the death of a leader, and the recent slaying of the leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

If the claim of responsibility is genuine, it would be the first time the group has struck outside of South Asia. It has no known global infrastructure like Al Qaeda. The group Pakistani Taliban has previously claimed responsibility for an attack in which it played no role.