Rice cookers spark bomb scare and evacuation of major New York subway station
- Police are seeking man seen taking objects out of shopping trolley and placing them at Fulton Street station, just blocks away from World Trade Centre
- Many rice cookers look like pressure cookers, but the latter use pressure to cook food quickly – a function that has been used to turn them into bombs
Three abandoned devices that looked like pressure cookers caused an evacuation of a major New York City subway station and closed off an intersection in another part of town Friday morning before police determined the objects were not explosives.
Police were looking to talk to a man seen on surveillance video taking two of the objects – which police identified as rice cookers – out of a shopping trolley and placing them in a subway station in lower Manhattan. In a photo released by authorities, the young man is lugging a cooker into an lift.
But police stressed that so far, it was not clear whether he was trying to frighten people or merely throwing the objects away.
“I would stop very short of calling him a suspect,” said John Miller, the New York Police Department’s top counterterror official.
“It is possible that somebody put out a bunch of items in the trash today and this guy picked them up and then discarded them, or it’s possible that this was an intentional act.”