This blogger just returned from New York and The 2010 NFL Draft, and given that a week ago Saturday Times Square, next to Radio City Music Hall, was bustling and teaming with people on a warm spring night, it's shocking to learn that Times Square's shut down by a car with a bomb in it.
It happened at between 6 and 6:30 PM EST Saturday and was a Nissan Pathfinder that was parked on West 45th Street near 7th Avenue according to Gothamist.com. A T-shirt vendor who was not named and who was a Vietnam Veteran told NYPD mounted police officer, Wade Rattagan that a SUV's motor was running with its hazzard lights flashing.
CNN interviewed another man,Hamid Boubain, who was standing not less than "15 feet" from the SUV when he told a friend "Yo yo look at this!" and said that police came onto the scene 15 minutes later to clear everyone out of the area.
Eventually, Times Square and most of Midtown Manhattan was a ghost town with patrons evacuated from restaurants or told to stay in theater playhouses until further notice. Police cleared an area from 45th to 48th Streets and between 6th and 8th Avenue, according to The New York Times.
Then New York Police used a robot to go in and enter the vehicle. Inside were "three propane tanks, two filled five-gallon gas containers, two clocks with batteries, consumer-grade fireworks and a locked metal box that resembled a gun locker" according to CNN.
The SUV itself was unidentified. The license plate came from another car and police contacted that person who told them they'd taken the original car with the plate to a junk yard. The Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) was removed. It was a deliberate but unsuccessful attempt to terrorize New York City.
The question is "who did it?" No one knows. There were claims that someone ran from the car, but those were unfounded. The attempt was compared to the bombing in Glasgow, but that was in 2007.
Stay tuned.
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