Police investigating Times Square explosion

BY ANDREW STRICKLER AND MATTHEW CHAYES | andrew.strickler@newsday.com

5:53 PM EST, March 6, 2008

New York police have released a surveillance video they believe shows the man who left an explosive device outside the Times Square military recruiting station early today, damaging the high profile office and prompting a huge police response.

The video, captured by a camera mounted at 1501 Broadway, shows a large man in a gray hooded sweatshirt atop a bike on the traffic island at 3:37 a.m. The man dismounts and heads toward the recruiting office at 3:38 a.m.

At 3:39 a.m., he re-enters the camera view, climbs back on the bike, and rides south on Broadway. Less than a minute later, a blast of white smoke shoots north away from the office, engulfing the traffic island for about 30 seconds.

Meanwhile, federal and New York officials said Thursday that the bombing is not likely the work of al-Qaida.

Nothing is certain yet, the officials said, but the middle-of-the-night timing of the blast -- when no one would be around to be hurt or killed -- suggests al-Qaida is not behind the attack.

"At this stage of the investigation, there doesn't seem to be a hallmark of AQ activity," a federal official said, using an abbreviation for the terror group. "It happened when there were no people around."

Another official graphically underlined why that matters: "Al-Qaida wants body counts."

City police commissioner Ray Kelly said the bomb was left in a metal ammunition box like those commonly found in Army surplus stores. "The box was blown apart," Kelly said. "But we're processing as much as we can to see if there is any evidentiary value."

Officials are also interviewing an eyewitness who said he saw a man fitting the description of the hooded suspect riding slowly on a bike in Times Square just before the explosion, Kelly said.

The bomb was "not a particularly sophisticated device" but was certainly capable of causing injury or death, Kelly said. He did not comment on what kind of explosives may have fueled the bomb, which he called a "low-order" weapon that could take a minute or more to blow after being activated.

Soon after the explosion, the Pentagon sent out an alert to its more than 1,000 recruiting stations nationwide, including those on Long Island. Recruiters at offices in Greenlawn and Hempstead said their activities were not disrupted by the bomb or the alert.

A Marine Corps spokesman said recruiters in the nine Northeastern U.S. states have "a heightened awareness of what happened." But he stopped short of saying whether there were specific security responses to the bombing.

"As Marines you remain vigilant about that stuff anyway," said Capt. Donald Caetano, who is based in Garden City.

Caetano said top military officials notified recruiters by e-mail and phone that they should be alert in the wake of the bombing.

Long Island's military recruiting stations include storefronts containing Army, Navy and Marine Corps offices in Hempstead, Greenlawn, Patchogue, Lindenhurst and elsewhere. Peace activists routinely stage demonstrations at the recruiting stations.

At the Armed Forces Career Center in Hempstead Village, a storefront office on Fulton Street, there was no unusually heightened security Thursday morning, said a Marine recruiter who would not give his name because he was not authorized to speak to the press. Business went on as usual, with uniformed servicemen coming and going through a door with a buzzer-controlled lock.

The three storefront offices of Marine, Navy and Army recruiters in a strip mall on Broadway in Greenlawn were closed, but not because of the bomb threat, a recruiter said. The stores are normally open based on recruiter schedules.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg said residents and visitors should consider the city a safe place to live, work and visit, and he said the NYPD together with federal investigators will track down whoever is responsible for the bombing.

"We will not tolerate such attacks," Bloomberg said in a news conference with Kelly. The mayor said he is proud to have a military recruiting station at such a high-profile location in the city, in part because it symbolizes American support for men and women in the armed forces.

The region's Joint Terrorism Task Force, largely made up of FBI and NYPD investigators, are seeking more videotape and witness evidence in the case, and the bomb evidence will be sent to FBI labs in Quantico, Va., for analysis, officials said.