U.S. nabs Times Square bomber at JFK airport
vehicle, which had been advertised on Web site Craigslist. NBC News earlier reported the suspect’s name was on an e-mail that was sent to the car’s seller last month.
In Bridgeport, the seller refused to answer questions put by the New York Times. “You can’t interview her,” said an unidentified man at the woman’s white clapboard house. “She already talked to the FBI.”
A man in his 40s who was seen in a security camera video apparently walking away from the SUV was initially a focus of the investigation. The New York police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, told the Times, however, that while investigators still wanted to speak to that man, he might not be connected to the failed bombing. Paul J. Browne, a spokesman for the department, told the paper: “It may turn out that he was just somebody in the area, but not connected with the car bomb.”
A metal rifle cabinet placed in the SUV’s cargo area was packed with fertilizer, but NYPD bomb experts believe it was not a type volatile enough to explode like the ammonium nitrate grade fertilizer used in previous terrorist bombings.
Police said it could have produced “a significant fireball” and sprayed shrapnel with enough force to kill pedestrians and knock out windows.
“Rube Goldberg contraption”
James M. Cavanaugh, a former bomb expert with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who investigated car bombs and tracked the Unabomber, told the New York Times that the device and the way it was designed speak to a “grandiose purpose.”
“I call this a Rube Goldberg contraption,” Cavanaugh told the newspaper. “It’s the ‘swing-the-arm-with-the-shoe-that-hits-the-ball-and-knocks-over-a-stick-that-knocks-something-off-a-shelf’ and it is all supposed to work.” He said that whoever made the bomb had “more desire than ability.”
The Times also reported that Kevin B. Barry, an official with the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators, said the attempted bomber had left many leads for detectives to follow. “He was trying to cover his tracks, but he left more clues than a guy walking into a bank to rob it without a mask. This guy left everything here but his wallet,” Barry said.
Chris , president of New York-based Insite Security, which works with Fortune 500 companies, said the device, as described by authorities, “doesn’t differ much at all from ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’” — the underground 1971 manual for homemade explosives. He said revelations that the fertilizer used could not have exploded suggested
