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| New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, left, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg hold a news conference, Thursday, April, 25, 2013 in New York. The two say the Boston Marathon bombing suspects intended to blow up their remaining explosives in Times Square. They said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told Boston investigators from his hospital bed that he and his brother had discussed going to New York to detonate their remaining explosives. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- The Boston Marathon bombers were headed for New York's Times Square
to blow up the rest of their explosives, authorities said Thursday, in
what they portrayed as a chilling, spur-of-the-moment scheme that fell
apart when the brothers realized the car they had hijacked was low on
gas.
"New York City was next on their list of targets," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.
New
York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told
interrogators from his hospital bed that he and his older brother
decided on the spot last Thursday night to drive to New York and launch
an attack. In their stolen SUV they had five pipe bombs and a
pressure-cooker explosive like the ones that blew up at the marathon,
Kelly said.
But when the Tsarnaev brothers
stopped at a gas station on the outskirts of Boston, the carjacking
victim they were holding hostage escaped and called police, Kelly said.
Later that night, police intercepted the brothers in a blazing gunbattle
that left 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev dead.
"We
don't know if we would have been able to stop the terrorists had they
arrived here from Boston," the mayor said. "We're just thankful that we
didn't have to find out that answer."
The news
caused New Yorkers to shudder with the thought that the city may have
narrowly escaped another terrorist attack, though whether the brothers
could have made it to the city is an open question. They were two of the
most-wanted men in the world, their faces splashed all over the
Internet and TV in surveillance-camera images released by the FBI hours
earlier.
Dzhokhar, 19, is charged with
carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing April 15 that killed three
people and wounded more than 260, and he could get the death penalty.
Christina DiIorio-Sterling, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz
in Boston, would not comment on whether authorities plan to add charges
based on the alleged plot to attack New York.
The
Middlesex County district attorney's office also is building a murder
case against the surviving Tsarnaev for the death of MIT police officer
Sean Collier three days after the bombings, office spokeswoman Stephanie
Guyotte said.
Investigators and lawmakers
briefed by the FBI have said the Tsarnaev brothers - ethnic Chechens
from Russia who had lived in the U.S. for about a decade - were
motivated by anger over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Based
on the younger man's interrogation and other evidence, authorities have
said it appears so far that the brothers were radicalized via Islamic
jihadi material on the Internet instead of any direct contact with
terrorist organizations, but they warned that it is still not certain.
Dzhokhar
was interrogated in his hospital room Sunday and Monday over a period
of 16 hours without being read his rights to remain silent and have an
attorney present. He immediately stopped talking after a magistrate
judge and a representative from the U.S. Attorney's office entered the
room and gave him his Miranda warning, according to a U.S. law
enforcement official and others briefed on the interrogation.
Kelly
and the mayor said they were briefed on the New York plot on Wednesday
night by the task force investigating the Boston bombing.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said in a CNN interview that the city should have been told earlier.
"Even
though this may or may not have been spontaneous, for all we know there
could be other conspirators out there, and the city should have been
alerted so it could go into its defensive mode," he said.
Asked
about the delay, Bloomberg said: "There's no reason to think the FBI
hides anything. The FBI does what they think is appropriate at the time,
and you'll have to ask them what they found and what the actual details
of the interrogation were. We were not there."
Kelly,
citing the interrogations, said that four days after the Boston
bombing, the Tsarnaev brothers "planned to travel to Manhattan to
detonate their remaining explosives in Times Square."
"They
discussed this while driving around in a Mercedes SUV that they
hijacked after they shot and killed the officer at MIT," the police
commissioner said. "That plan, however, fell apart when they realized
that the vehicle they hijacked was low on gas and ordered the driver to
stop at a nearby gas station."
A day earlier,
Kelly said that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had talked about coming to New York
"to party" after the attack and that there wasn't evidence of a plot
against the city. But Kelly said a later interview with the suspect
turned up the information.
"He was a lot more lucid and gave more detail in the second interrogation," Kelly said.
Kelly
said there was no evidence New York was still a target. But in a show
of force, police cruisers with blinking red lights were lined up in the
middle of Times Square on Thursday afternoon, and uniformed officers
stood shoulder to shoulder.
"Why are they
standing like that? This is supposed to make me feel safer?" asked
Elisabeth Bennecib, a tourist and legal consultant from Toulouse,
France. "It makes me feel more anxious, like something bad is about to
happen."
Above the square, an electronic news
ticker announced that the Boston Marathon suspects' next target might
have been Times Square.
Outside Penn Station,
Wayne Harris, a schoolteacher from Queens, said: "We don't know when a
terrorist attack will happen next in New York, but it will happen. It
didn't happen this time, by the grace of God. God protected us this
time."
In 2010, Times Square was targeted with
a car bomb that never went off. Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad had
planted a bomb in an SUV, but street vendors noticed smoke and it was
disabled. Shahzad was arrested as he tried to leave the country and was
sentenced to life in prison.
With tens of
millions of dollars in federal homeland security funding at stake,
Bloomberg and Kelly have repeatedly sought to remind the public that New
York remains at the top of terrorists' wish list. They have said the
city has been targeted in more than a dozen plots since 9/11.
Kelly
said Dzhokhar was photographed in Times Square with friends in April
2012 and was in the city again in November 2012, but "we don't know if
those visits were related in any way to what he described as the
brothers' spontaneous decision to hit Times Square."
He
said the police intelligence division is trying to establish Dzhokhar's
movements in the city and determine who might have been with him.
Meanwhile,
the Tsarnaev brothers' father said he is leaving Russia for the U.S. in
the next day or two, but their mother said she was still thinking it
over.
Anzor Tsarnaev has expressed a desire to
go to the U.S. to find out what happened with his sons, defend the
hospitalized son and, if possible, bring the older son's body back to
Russia for burial.
Their mother, Zubeidat
Tsarnaeva, who was charged with shoplifting in the U.S. last summer,
said she has been assured by lawyers that she would not be arrested, but
was still deciding whether to go.
