(MENAFN- Gulf Times) New York went on alert for two hours yesterday during the morning rush hour because of three suspicious objects that turned out to be empty rice cookers.
Police said the alarm was first sounded in Manhattan around 7am (1100 GMT) when a passenger saw a cooker abandoned at the Fulton Street subway station near the World Trade Centre a neighbourhood rebuilt after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
A second rice cooker was found in another part of the same station.
The station was quickly evacuated, service on two subway lines was suspended and trains on other lines serving Fulton Street bypassed the station.
As police announced the objects turned out to be harmless, a third suspicious object was detected on 16th Street in the Chelsea district further to the north.
It, too, turned out to be a rice cooker, said John Miller, the New York Police Department's deputy commissioner for intelligence and counter-terrorism.
It was in Chelsea that a pressure cooker containing a homemade explosive device detonated in September 2016, injuring 31 people and triggering panic in a city that had not endured an attack since 9/11.
Ahmad Rahimi, an Afghan-born man who sympathised with religious extremist causes, was sentenced to life in prison over that incident.
He had actually placed three bombs that day but only one went off.
Surveillance video shows a dark-haired man in his 20s or 30s with a shopping cart placing the devices at two locations inside the busy downtown Fulton Street subway station, said Miller.
'Because of the timing and the placement and items we're carrying this right now as a hoax device, Miller told reporters at the scene. 'That's the investigative category.
The unidentified man is 'not a suspect but certainly someone we'd want to interview, he said.
Police posted two photographs on social media of the cookers found at Fulton Street.
Miller said he did not know if the third cooker was linked to the first two, although they were all the same model.
Governor Andrew Cuomo said during an interview on CBS 880: 'It turned out to be nothing, but, look, this is a frightening world we live in. All of these situations have to be taken seriously because, God forbid, one day, it's not.
'Unfortunately we learned the hard way after 9/11 and we are prepared, Cuomo said.
Since the attack by Rahimi, the US financial capital has been hit by two other attacks.
In October 2017, an Uzbek man named Sayfullo Saipov used a truck to run over bikers and pedestrians on a bike path in Manhattan, killing eight people and injuring 12.
His trial is scheduled for April of next year.
If convicted, Saipov could face the death penalty.
In December 2017, a Bangladeshi immigrant named Akayed Ullah set off a bomb in a subway tunnel near Times Square, leaving three people slightly injured.
He was found guilty of terrorism-related offences and will be sentenced on September 10.
Pressure cookers were turned into bombs by a pair of ethnic Chechen brothers when they killed three people and injured more than 200 at the 2013 Boston Marathon.
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