Tag Archives: Bomb

New York charges Times Square bomb suspect; Bangladesh questions wife

New York charges Times Square bomb suspect; Bangladesh questions wife

By Ruma Paul and Daniel Trotta

DHAKA/NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York officials on Tuesday said they charged a Bangladeshi man with terrorism, accusing him of setting off a pipe bomb a day earlier in a crowded Manhattan commuter hub, as investigators in his home country questioned his wife.

Akayed Ullah, 27, was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, supporting an act of terrorism, and making a terroristic threat under New York state law, the New York Police Department said, adding U.S. authorities may also bring federal charges.

Investigators in Bangladesh were questioning Ullah’s wife, according to two officials who declined to be identified as they were not permitted to discuss the matter publicly. They did not provide details on the questioning, but said the couple have a six-month-old baby boy.

“We have found his wife and in-laws in Dhaka. We are interviewing them,” one of the police officials told Reuters.

New York police say Ullah set off a pipe bomb in an underground corridor of the subway system that connects Times Square to the Port Authority Bus Terminal at rush hour on Monday morning, injuring himself and three others.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called it an attempted terrorist attack, and U.S. officials said it appeared to be a rare if not unprecedented attempt at suicide bombing on U.S. soil.

Ullah survived with burns and lacerations and was taken to hospital in police custody. The three bystanders sustained minor injuries.

The NYPD and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were conducting the investigation in conjunction with other agencies through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and were asking the public for any information about the suspect.

Authorities in Bangladesh began to track down Ullah’s family soon after news of the attack broke and they first found a cousin, said a third official, Mahiuddin Mahmud.

“We learned from his cousin that he had a wife and a baby in Bangladesh,” Mahmud said.

The cousin, Emdad Ullah, told Reuters that Ullah and his family originally lived in the Chittagong region in southern Bangladesh, but had moved to the capital, Dhaka, years ago.

Ullah married a Bangladeshi woman about two years ago and she lived in Dhaka, the cousin said, adding that he was educated in Bangladesh before he moved to the United States.

Bangladesh’s police chief had told Reuters on Monday that Ullah had no criminal record in his home country, which he last visited in September.

Ullah lived with his mother, sister and two brothers in Brooklyn and was a green card holder, said Shameem Ahsan, consul general of Bangladesh in New York.

A U.S. enforcement official familiar with the investigation into Monday’s attack said officers had found evidence that Ullah had watched Islamic State propaganda on the internet.

IMMIGRATION REFORM

Bangladesh strongly condemned the attack.

“A terrorist is a terrorist irrespective of his or her ethnicity or religion, and must be brought to justice,” the government said in a statement.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said the attack emphasized the need for U.S. immigration reforms.

“America must fix its lax immigration system, which allows far too many dangerous, inadequately vetted people to access our country,” he said in a statement.

The president also criticized the visa program that allowed Ullah to enter the United States in 2011 because he had family members already in the country, saying such family visas are “incompatible with national security.”

H.T. Imam, a political adviser to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said he believed the attack would have no “negative impact” on relations with the United States.

“The U.S. government is well informed about the Bangladesh government’s attitude regarding terror activities,” Imam said.

The U.S. Supreme Court last week handed a victory to Trump by allowing his latest travel ban, targeting people from six Muslim-majority countries, to go into full effect even as legal challenges continued in lower courts.

The ban covers people from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen seeking to enter the United States. Trump has said the travel ban is needed to protect the United States from terrorism by Islamist militants.

Bangladesh is not among the countries impacted by the ban.

(Additional reporting by Serajul Quadir; Writing by Euan Rocha and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Scott Malone and Bernadette Baum)

Explosion rocks New York commuter hub, suspect in custody

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo speaks during a news conference outside the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal following reports of an explosion, in New York City, U.S. December 11, 2017.

By Nick Zieminski and Daniel Trotta

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A man with a homemade bomb strapped to his body set off an explosion at a New York commuter hub during rush hour on Monday, injuring himself and three others in what New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called an attempted terrorist attack.

The suspect in the incident at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a block from Times Square, was identified as Akayed Ullah, the New York Police Department commissioner said. The suspect had burns and lacerations while three other people, including a police officer, had minor injuries.

The weapon was based on a pipe bomb and fixed to the suspect with zip ties and velcro, police said. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, speaking at a news conference near the site, described the device as “amateur level.”

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told the same news conference that the incident, which happened at the start of the city’s rush hour, was “an attempted terrorist attack.”

“As New Yorkers our lives revolve around the subways. When we hear of an attack in the subways it is incredibly unsettling,” de Blasio said.

New York City was a target, said John Miller, Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism.

NYPD Crime Scene Investigation team are seen outside the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal, after reports of an explosion, in New York City, U.S., December 11, 2017.

NYPD Crime Scene Investigation team are seen outside the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal, after reports of an explosion, in New York City, U.S., December 11, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Miller cited the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that killed more than 2,750 people in New York and nearly 3,000 people total; and the World Trade Center bombing of February 26, 1993, that killed six people.

“In the course of the post 9/11 world, as you are aware, there’s also been approximately 26 plots that we can talk about that have been prevented through intelligence, investigation and intervention.”

The incident was captured on security video, the police said. Video posted on NYPost.com showed smoke and a man lying in the tunnel that connects the Times Square subway station to the bus station. A photograph showed a man lying face down, with tattered clothes and burns on his torso.

“There was a stampede up the stairs to get out,” said Diego Fernandez, one of the commuters. “Everybody was scared and running and shouting.”

Alicja Wlodkowski, a Pennsylvania resident in New York for the day, was sitting in a restaurant in the bus terminal.

Police officers stand on a closed West 42nd Street near the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal after reports of an explosion in New York City, New York, U.S., December 11,

Police officers stand on a closed West 42nd Street near the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal after reports of an explosion in New York City, New York, U.S., December 11, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Segar

“Suddenly, I saw a group of people, like six people, running like nuts. A woman fell. No one even went to stop and help her because the panic was so scary.”

The bus terminal was temporarily shut down and a large swath of midtown Manhattan was closed to traffic. Subway train service was returning to normal after earlier disruptions.

WABC reported the suspect was in his 20s and that he has been in the United States for seven years and has an address in New York’s Brooklyn. The NYPD shut down the entire block and there was heavy police presence outside the home.

First reports of the incident began soon after 7 a.m. (1200 GMT). New York in December sees a surge of visitors who come to see elaborate store displays, the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and Broadway shows.

The incident rippled through U.S. financial markets, briefly weakening equity markets as they were starting trading for the week and giving a modest lift to safe-haven assets such as U.S. Treasuries.

S&P 500 index emini futures dipped in the moments after the initial reports of an explosion, but major stock indexes later opened slightly higher.

The incident occurred less than two months after an Uzbek immigrant killed eight people by speeding a rental truck down a New York City bike path, in an attack for which Islamic State claimed responsibility.

In September 2016, a man injured 31 people when he set off a homemade bomb in New York’s Chelsea district.

(Reporting By Nick Zieminski, Dan Trotta and Simon Webb in New York, additional reporting by Bernie Woodall, Gina Cherelus, Makini Brice and Fred Katayama; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Florida man sentenced to 25 years for attempt to blow up synagogue

(Reuters) – A Florida man was sentenced by a U.S. judge on Tuesday to 25 years in prison for trying to blow up a synagogue in the state during a Jewish holiday last year, court officials said.

James Medina, 41, will first be treated at a U.S. prison medical facility for a brain cyst and mental illness before being moved into the general prison population, U.S. District Judge Robert Scola in Miami ruled.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation began watching Medina, who had converted to Islam, after he began expressing anti-Semitic views and a wish to attack a synagogue. They launched an investigation in late March 2016, court documents showed

Medina, who faced up to life in prison, had pleaded guilty in August 2017 to charges of an attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and an attempted religious hate crime, court documents showed.

“This is a very, very serious offense,” Scola was quoted as saying in court by the Miami Herald.

Medina’s federal public defender, Hector Dopico, declined to comment when reached by Reuters on Tuesday afternoon.

Medina met with an FBI-affiliated confidential informant and explained his plan to attack a synagogue in Aventura, Florida, near Miami, the documents showed.

“Medina wanted to witness the explosion, hearing and feeling the blast from (a) nearby car,” the informant cited Medina as saying, according to the documents.

Asked why he wanted to do it, Medina said he wanted to kill Jews, adding: “It’s my call of duty.”

Medina was supplied with what he thought was an explosive device by federal law enforcement. The device was inert and posed no danger to the public, federal law enforcement said in court filings.

He was taken into custody as he approached the synagogue with the inert device and later admitted to his crimes, they said. No one was hurt.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas; editing by Bernadette Baum and Diane Craft)

German police arrest Syrian suspected of planning bomb attack

German police arrest Syrian suspected of planning bomb attack

BERLIN (Reuters) – German police arrested a 19-year-old Syrian suspected of planning an Islamist-motivated bomb attack in Germany with the aim of killing as many people as possible, the federal prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday.

The man, whose name was given as Yamen A., was arrested in the early hours in the northeastern town of Schwerin. Police searched his home and also those of other people not suspected of being directly involved.

“According to the findings so far, Yamen A. made the decision no later than July 2017 to detonate an explosive device in Germany in order to kill and injure as many people as possible,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

“As a result, he began to procure components and chemicals needed to make an explosive device. Whether the suspect had already envisaged a specific target for his bomb attack is still unclear,” the office added.

There were no indications that he was a member of a terrorist organization, it said. It did not say when he arrived in Germany.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is trying to form a new coalition government after elections last month, has come under fire for allowing more than one million people to enter Germany over the past two years – many of them refugees from Syria.

Her ‘open door’ refugee policy saw her conservatives bleed support in the election to the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), which won seats in the national parliament for the first time.

The prosecutor’s office said it would give an update on the investigation at 2 p.m. (1300 GMT).

(Writing by Paul Carrel; Editing by Peter Graff)

Car bombs kill at least 22 in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu: police

Civilians evacuate from the scene of an explosion in KM4 street in the Hodan district of Mogadishu, Somalia October 14, 2017. REUTERS/Feisal Omar TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

By Abdi Sheikh

MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Two car bombs in separate parts of Somalia’s capital Mogadishu killed at least 22 people on Saturday and injured several others, police said.

The first explosion – in the city’s K5 Junction area which is lined with government offices, hotels, and restaurants – destroyed several buildings and set dozens of vehicles on fire.

“We know that at least 20 civilians are dead while dozens of others are wounded,” said Abdullahi Nur, a police officer who was in the area.

“The death toll will surely rise. We are still busy transporting casualties,” he said, adding that there were bodies under the rubble.

About two hours later, a second blast took place in the city’s Madina district.

“It was a car bomb. Two civilians were killed, ” Siyad Farah, a police major, told Reuters, adding that a suspect had been caught on suspicion of planting explosives.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, although the Islamist al Shabaab group has carried out regular attacks

The al Qaeda-allied group is waging an insurgency to topple the weak U.N.-backed government and its African Union allies and impose its own strict interpretation of Islam.

They frequently launch gun, grenade and bomb attacks in Mogadishu and other regions controlled by the federal government, though in recent years the militants have lost most territory under their control to African Union peacekeepers and government troops.

(Writing by Aaron Maasho; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Five detained over wired explosives found in posh Paris neighborhood

By Emmanuel Jarry

PARIS (Reuters) – French counter-terrorism investigators questioned five people on Tuesday after police over the weekend found what appeared to be a ready-to-detonate bomb at an apartment building in one of Paris’s poshest neighborhoods.

Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said one of those arrested was on an intelligence services list of “radicalized” persons – a list that includes the names of potential Islamist militants.

“We are still in a state of war,” Collomb, speaking after a Sunday attack in which a man stabbed and killed two women outside the train station in Marseille, told France Inter radio.

Judicial sources said the explosive device included two gas canisters inside the building in the affluent 16th district of western Paris and two outside, some of them doused with petrol and wired to connect to a mobile phone.

More than 230 people have been killed in attacks by Islamist militants in France over the past three years. The Islamic State militant group, whose bases in Syria and Iraq are being bombed by French war planes, has urged followers to attack France.

Most of those killed died when Islamist gunmen and suicide bombers targeted Paris in 2015, and when a man drove a large truck into crowds in the Riviera resort of Nice in 2016.

Since then, there has been a string of attacks perpetrated by lone assailants, often targeting police or soldiers.

“The threat is changing form,” said Collomb.

A counter-terrorism investigation is also under way after the attack on Sunday, when a man slit the throat of one of his victims and killed her cousin before being shot dead by soldiers in the southern port city.

Tunisian authorities have identified the attacker as Ahmed Hanachi, Collomb told parliament. He lived in France from 2005 to 2006 and was known to police under several alias’ for petty crimes, but had not previously caught the attention of French intelligence agencies.

Hanachi was arrested in the city of Lyon on Friday on suspicion of theft. He was carrying a Tunisian passport and released 24 hours later, a day before committing the attack.

“All these years, he used multiple identities in France as well as in Italy, declaring himself to be Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian,” Collomb said.

France declared a state of emergency in late 2015 after the Paris attack, giving police special search and arrest powers to combat would-be terrorists.

Lawmakers will vote later on Tuesday on a bill to convert many of those emergency measures into common law.

(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta, Brian Love and Emmanuel Jarry; Writing by Brian Love; Editing by Richard Lough)

Huge WW2 bomb to be defused close to German gold reserves

FILE PHOTO: The skyline of Frankfurt, Germany, May 11, 2017. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach/File Photo

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Frankfurt’s city center, an area including police headquarters, two hospitals, transport systems and Germany’s central bank storing $70 billion in gold reserves will be evacuated on Sunday to allow the defusing of a 1.8 ton World War Two bomb.

A spokesman for the German Bundesbank said, however, “the usual security arrangements” would remain in place while experts worked to disarm the bomb, dropped by the British air force and uncovered during excavation of a building site.

The Bundesbank headquarters, less than 600 meters from the location of the bomb, stores 1,710 tonnes of gold underground, around half the country’s reserves.

“We have never defused a bomb of this size,” bomb disposal expert Rene Bennert told Reuters, adding that it had been damaged on impact when it was dropped between 1943 and 1945.

Airspace for 1.5 kilometers around the bomb site will also be closed.

Frankfurt city officials said more than 60,000 residents would be evacuated for at least 12 hours. The evacuation area would also include 20 retirement homes, the Opera house and the diplomatic quarter.

Bomb disposal experts will make use of a “Rocket Wrench” to try and unscrew the fuses attached to the HC 4,000 bomb. If that fails, a water jet will be used to cut the fuses away from the bomb, Bennert told Reuters.

The most dangerous part of the exercise will be applying the wrench, Bennert said.

Roads and transport systems, including the underground, will be closed during the work and for at least two hours after the bomb is defused, to allow patients to be transported back to hospitals without traffic.

It is not unusual for unexploded bombs from World War Two air raids to be found in German cities, but rarely are they so large and in such a sensitive position.

(Reporting by Edward Taylor and Frank Siebelt; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Several wounded after blast hits bus in Turkey’s Izmir

Plainclothes police officers stand after an explosion hit a shuttle bus carrying prison guards in Izmir, Turkey, August 31, 2017. REUTERS/Kemal Aslan

By Ece Toksabay

ANKARA (Reuters) – Seven people were wounded when an explosion hit a shuttle bus carrying prison guards in the Turkish coastal province of Izmir on Thursday, and authorities were investigating a possible terrorist attack, the local mayor said.

The bus was hit as it passed a garbage container at around 7:40 a.m. (0440 GMT), Levent Piristina, the mayor of Izmir’s Buca district, said on Twitter.

Photographs he posted on social media showed its windows blown out and its windscreen shattered. The force of the blast appeared to have blown out some of the bus’s panels, and the nearby street was littered with debris.

“We are getting information from police sources and they are focusing on the possibility of a terrorist attack,” he said, adding that all seven wounded were in good condition.

Both state-run TRT Haber and private broadcaster Dogan news agency said the explosion was caused by a bomb placed in the garbage container that exploded when the shuttle bus passed.

No one immediately claimed responsibility. Both Kurdish militants and jihadist Islamic State militants have carried out suicide and bomb attacks in major Turkish cities in recent years.

Kurdish militants have previously targeted buses carrying security personnel.

In December, a bomb killed at least 13 soldiers and wounded more than 50 when it ripped through a bus carrying off-duty military personnel in the central city of Kayseri, an attack the government blamed on Kurdish militants.

The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), considered a terrorist organization by the United States, Turkey and the European Union, has waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state.

The outlawed PKK wants autonomy for Turkey’s largely Kurdish southeast.

(Editing by Dominic Evans and David Dolan)

Texas man charged with trying to blow up Confederate statue

Texas man charged with trying to blow up Confederate statue

By Alex Dobuzinskis and Gina Cherelus

(Reuters) – Authorities in Houston charged a 25-year-old man on Monday with trying to blow up a Confederate statue, federal prosecutors said, following demonstrations and fierce debate in the United States about race and the legacy of America’s Civil War.

Word of the arrest of Andrew Schneck came just hours after the University of Texas at Austin said it moved statues tied to the Confederacy at its campus because they had become “symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism.”

White nationalists rallied earlier this month against proposals to take down a similar statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one woman was killed when a man crashed his car into a crowd of anti-racism counterprotesters.

The violence triggered the biggest domestic crisis yet for President Donald Trump, who provoked anger across the political spectrum for not immediately condemning white nationalists and for praising “very fine people” on both sides of the fight.

On Saturday night, a park ranger spotted Schneck kneeling in bushes in front of the General Dowling Monument in Houston’s Hermann Park, Federal prosecutors said in a statement.

In Schneck’s possession were a timer, wires, duct tape and two types of explosive including nitroglycerin, according to the prosecutors who described it as one of the world’s most powerful explosives. The items could have been used to make a viable explosive device, the prosecutors’ statement said.

If convicted of trying to maliciously damage or destroy property receiving federal financial assistance, Schneck faces up to 40 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

“It’s an evolving situation and the investigation is continuing,” Schneck’s attorney, Philip Hilder, said by phone. “So far I have not seen any evidence and it would be premature to comment at this time.”

A growing number of U.S. political leaders have called for the removal of statues honoring the Confederacy. Civil rights activists charge they promote racism while advocates of the statues contend they are a reminder of their heritage.

The city of West Palm Beach near Miami became the latest community on Monday to prepare to remove a Confederate symbol. The monument in a public cemetery belongs to the Daughters of the Confederacy, and it will be stored for the organization after its removal, Mayor Jeri Muoio told reporters.

Among the four statues removed overnight at the University at Austin was one of General Robert E. Lee, who led the pro-slavery Confederacy’s army during the Civil War.

Fenves said the statue of Lee and two others will be placed in the school’s Briscoe Center for American History and made available for scholarly study.

The school’s president, Greg Fenves, said in a statement that the monuments had to go following the “horrific displays of hatred” in Virginia that shocked and saddened the nation.

There are about 700 monuments to the Confederacy in public spaces across the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, with the majority of them erected early in the 20th century amid a backlash among segregationists against the civil rights movement.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Gina Cherelus in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Andrea Ricci)

Man arrested in plot to bomb Oklahoma bank

Jerry Drake Varnell, is pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters August 14, 2017. Oklahoma Department of Corrections/Handout via REUTERS

(Reuters) – An Oklahoma man was arrested after what he thought was an attempt over the weekend to bomb an Oklahoma City bank building as part of an anti-government plot, U.S. prosecutors said on Monday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Jerry Drake Varnell, 23, on Saturday after an undercover agent posed as a co-conspirator and agreed to help him build what he believed was a 1,000-pound (454 kg) explosive.

Varnell had initially planned to bomb the U.S. Federal Reserve in Washington in a manner similar to the 1995 explosion at a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, according to a complaint.

FBI agents arrested Varnell after he went as far as making a call early on Saturday morning to a mobile phone he believed would detonate a device in a van parked next to a BancFirst Corp building in downtown Oklahoma City, the complaint said.

“This arrest is the culmination of a long-term domestic terrorism investigation involving an undercover operation, during which Varnell had been monitored closely for months as the alleged bomb plot developed,” federal prosecutors said in a statement. “The device was actually inert, and the public was not in danger.”

Varnell, of Sayre, Oklahoma, was charged with malicious attempted destruction of a building in interstate commerce. He is expected to make his first court appearance in federal court in Oklahoma City on Monday afternoon.

 

(Reporting by Joseph Ax in New York and Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Lisa Von Ahn)