NYPD: Failed Times Square car bomb contained non-explosive fertilizer, would not have gone off

NYPD: Car bomb contained nonexplosive fertilizer

NEW YORK — New York City police investigating a botched car bombing in Times Square say the bomb contained fertilizer that was incapable of exploding.

Top police spokesman Paul Browne says more than 100 pounds of a substance found in the back of an SUV parked on a busy city street near a theater showing “The Lion King” was fertilizer.

But unlike the ammonium nitrate grade fertilizer that has been used in terror attacks including the Oklahoma City bombing, Browne says this fertilizer would not have caused a massive explosion.

Police are trying to determine what was in the homemade bomb, why it failed and who was responsible for the botched bombing, which sent thousands of tourists into a panic on Saturday night.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

NEW YORK (AP) — Police investigating a terror attack that could have set off a deadly fireball in Times Square focused Sunday on finding a man who was videotaped shedding his shirt near the SUV where the bomb was found. They also were trying to determine whether more than 100 pounds of a fertilizer-like substance in the vehicle could have made the crude device even more devastating.

The video shows an unidentified white man in his 40s slipping down an alley, taking off one shirt and revealing another underneath. In the same clip, he’s seen looking back in the direction of the smoking vehicle and furtively putting the first shirt in a bag, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

The homemade bomb was made largely with ordinary items including three barbecue grill-sized propane tanks, two 5-gallon gasoline containers, store-bought fireworks and cheap alarm clocks attached to wires. If successfully detonated, police said at a minimum it would have sprayed shrapnel and metal parts over one of America’s busiest streets, full of Broadway theaters and restaurants, on a Saturday night.

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

Authorities didn’t know how deadly the bomb could have been, how it failed or who was responsible.

The bomb at Times Square, one of the flashiest and best-known places on Earth, was found at the height of dinner hour before theatergoers headed to Saturday night shows.

The city’s busiest streets, choked with taxis and people on one of the first summer-like days of the year, were shut down for 10 hours, unnerving thousands of tourists attending Broadway show, museums and other city sights.

“No more New York,” said Crysta Salinas. The 28-year-old Houston woman was stuck waiting in a deli until 2 a.m. because part of a Marriott hotel was evacuated because of the bomb.

Police on Sunday still hadn’t identified every piece of the device — including eight bags of an unknown substance found in a gun locker. The substance weighed more than 100 pounds, and Kelly said it “looks and feels” like fertilizer. Tests were pending.

Timers were connected to a 16-ounce can filled with the fireworks, which were apparently intended to set the gas cans and propane afire, Kelly said.

He said the bomb “looks like it would have caused a significant fireball” had it fully detonated. He said the vehicle would have been “cut in half” by an explosion and people nearby could have been sprayed by shrapnel and killed.

A Pakistani Taliban group claimed responsibility for the failed attack in a 1-minute video. Kelly, however, said police have no evidence to support the claims, and noted that the same group had falsely taken credit for previous attacks on U.S. soil. The commissioner also cast doubt on an e-mail to a news outlet claiming responsibility.

The New York Police Department and FBI also examining “hundreds of hours” of security videotape from around Times Square, Kelly said.

Police released a photograph of the SUV, a dark-colored Nissan Pathfinder, as it crossed an intersection at 6:28 p.m. Saturday. A vendor pointed the SUV out to an officer about two minutes later,

Police said they had identified the registered owner of the Pathfinder, but hadn’t spoken to him yet. The license plate found on the vehicle did not belong to the SUV; police said it came from a car found in a repair shop in Connecticut.

Duane Jackson, a 58-year-old handbag vendor from Buchanan, N.Y., said he noticed the car and wondered who had left it there.

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

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 passing mounted police officer.

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. “I’m less than 8 feet away from the car.”

Times Square lies about four miles north of where terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, then laid waste to it on Sept. 11, 2001.

Top federal law enforcement and intelligence officials — Obama’s national security adviser James Jones, national intelligence director Dennis Blair, CIA chief Leon Panetta, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder — planned to participate in a meeting later Sunday on the bomb.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility in a video posted on the Internet Sunday, according to the SITE Intelligence Group. SITE, a U.S.-based terrorist tracking organization, first uncovered the video on YouTube; it later appeared to have been removed from the website.

In a copy of the video provided by SITE, an unidentified voice speaking in Urdu, the primary language in Pakistan, says the group takes “full responsibility for the recent attack in the USA.” The video does not mention any details about Saturday’s attack.

The militant group said the attack was revenge for the death of its leader, Baitullah Mehsud, and the recent slaying of al-Qaida in Iraq leaders Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who were killed by U.S. and Iraqi troops last month north of Baghdad. The video also mentioned Aafia Siddiqui, a 37-year-old Pakistani scientist who was convicted in a U.S. court in New York in February of trying to kill American service personnel after her arrest in Afghanistan in 2008.

If the claim is genuine, it would be the first time the Pakistani Taliban has struck outside of South Asia. It has no known global infrastructure like al-Qaida.

In at least one past instance, the Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for an attack it played no role in. Mehsud reportedly said his men were behind a mass shooting in March 2009 at the American Civic Association in Binghamton, N.Y., in April 2009. That claim turned out to be false.

The last terror threat in New York came last fall when air shuttle driver Najibullah Zazi admitted to a foiled homemade bomb plot aimed at the city subway system.

The theater district in London was the target of a propane bomb attack in 2007. No one was injured when police discovered two Mercedes loaded with nails packed around canisters of propane and gasoline.

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Cristian Salazar, Michael Kuchwara and AP Radio correspondent Julie Walker in New York, AP Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier, AP writers Eileen Sullivan, Pete Yost and Kimberly Dozier in Washington, Colleen Long in North Carolina, Robert H. Reid in Kabul and Ryan Lucas in Cairo.