An explosion rocked the bustling Chelsea district of Manhattan on Saturday night, injuring at least 29 people in what authorities described as a deliberate, criminal act, while saying investigators had found no evidence of a “terror connection.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and other city officials said investigators had ruled out a gas leak as the cause of the blast, but they stopped short of calling it a bombing and declined to specify precisely what they believed may have triggered the explosion.
Police said a sweep of the neighbourhood following the blast had turned up a possible “secondary device” four blocks away consisting of a pressure cooker with wires attached to it and connected to a cell phone.
Residents living nearby were advised to stay away from windows facing the street as a precaution, and the item was later safely moved to a police firing range for further examination, officer Christopher Pisano said.
As of Sunday morning, police were still seeking to determine whether the item was an explosive and had not detonated it, said New York police Lieutenant Thomas Antonetti.
Pressure cookers packed with explosives and detonated with timing devices were used by two Massachusetts brothers in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 260.
The latest blast came less than a week after law enforcement agencies around the country were on heightened alert for the 15th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, airline-hijacking attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Remaining circumspect about the exact nature of the explosion in Chelsea, De Blasio said early indications were that it was “an intentional act.” He added that the site of the blast, outside on a major thoroughfare in the fashionable West Side Manhattan neighbourhood, was being treated as a crime scene.
“There is no evidence at this point of a terror connection,” the mayor said at a news conference about three hours after the blast. “There is no specific and credible threat against New York City at this point in time from any terror organisation.”
The mayor also said investigators did not believe there was any link to a pipe bomb that exploded earlier on Saturday in the New Jersey beach town of Seaside Park. No injuries were reported in that blast, from a device planted in a plastic trash can along the route of a charity foot race.
But a US official said that a Joint Terrorism Task Force, an interagency group of federal, state and local officials, was called to investigate the Chelsea blast, suggesting authorities have not ruled out the possibility of a terror connection.
A joint task force also took the lead in investigating the New Jersey incident.
“Just before I got off the plane, a bomb went off in New York, and nobody knows exactly what’s going on,” Trump said a hours before New York officials spoke publicly about the blast.
“We better get very tough, folks.”
Democratic rival Hillary Clinton made a statement on her campaign plane on the ground in New York, saying she had been briefed on “the bombings in New York and New Jersey.” But she said she would wait until she had more information before commenting further.