The Latest: Police seeking man who placed cookers in subway

By Associated Press 17 August 2019, 12:00AM

NEW YORK (AP) — The Latest on suspicious objects found in New York City (all times local):

10:10 a.m.

Police say they are looking for a man who was recorded on security footage placing a pair of rice cookers in a New York City subway station.

The discovery of the cookers in a Lower Manhattan station Friday prompted an evacuation and roiled the morning commute. A third cooker was later discovered in another part of town above ground.

Senior NYPD official John Miller says cameras in the Fulton Street station captured a man with a shopping cart putting cookers in two locations in the subway station.

He says police were trying to identify the man.

Miller said it was still unclear whether the man was intentionally trying to alarm the public or "discarding items he was no longer interested in."

Miller says all three cookers were the same model.

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9:30 a.m.

New York City police briefly urged people to avoid an intersection in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood as authorities checked out a suspicious package, before finding that it wasn't harmful.

The scare happened about two hours after two abandoned objects that looked like pressure cookers prompted an evacuation of a major transit hub in lower Manhattan. The police bomb squad later determined they were not explosives.

Following that scare, the police department tweeted around 9 a.m. that it was looking into an item about 2 miles (3 kilometers) away from the earlier find at Fulton Street.

Police announced within 15 minutes that it had been deemed safe.

There weren't immediate details about the Chelsea object, which was above ground. Police said it was too soon to know whether it was related to the objects at the Fulton Street station.

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8:30 a.m.

Police say two suspicious objects that prompted an evacuation of a major lower Manhattan subway station during the morning commute are not explosives.

New York Police Department Counterterrorism Chief James Waters tweeted Friday that the bomb squad cleared the items found at the Fulton Street station.

Waters posted photos of the objects, which looked like pressure cookers or electric crockpots.

They were found at the line that carries No. 2 and 3 trains around 7 a.m.

The station is a busy transit hub a few blocks from the World Trade Center.

In 2017, a would-be suicide attacker set off a homemade pipe bomb in an underground passageway at the Times Square subway station during rush hour, seriously injuring himself.

By Associated Press 17 August 2019, 12:00AM

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