‘They yearn to attack NEW YORK CITY’
DAMAGE WAS MINIMAL; THE FREQUENCY ISN’T
The pipe bomb was crude, attached to the attacker by Velcro and plastic ties, and the damage minimal — three people suffered minor injuries and even the would-be suicide bomber survived.
But once again, New York City was the target of a terrorist attack. Monday’s explosion underscored the difficulty of protecting a city of 8.5 million, America’s largest, while officials also acknowledged New York City would always be a target.
“This was an attempted terrorist attack,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “Thank God the perpetrator did not achieve his ultimate goals.
“The choice of New York is always for a reason because we’re a beacon to the world and we actually show that a society of many faiths and many backgrounds can work and we show that democracy can work and our enemies want to undermine that and the terrorists want to undermine that so they yearn to attack New York City.”
John Miller, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counter-terrorism, said the city had been the target of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 9/11 catastrophe in 2001 and 26 other plots had been “prevented through intelligence, investigation and interdiction.”
Monday’s attack, in the middle of Christmas season when the city is filled with day-trippers and tourists expecting a fairy tale Manhattan, was the second on New Yorkers in six weeks, coming after a man in a rented truck drove up a crowded bike path on Halloween, killing eight people.
In the sprawling Times Square station, a “low, muffled sound” was heard when the bomb detonated, according to the New York Times.
“You can tell that it was not normal commuter noise,” said Roxanne Malaspina, 50, an employee in the Bloomberg legal department. She had just got off the A train when she heard the explosion and joined a crowd running further into the station to catch a train away from the area.
“It created a little bit of a panic in that underground passageway,” Malaspina said. “It’s not like normal commuter chaos.” Port Authority police said officers found a man injured on the ground, with wires protruding from his jacket to his pants and the device strapped to his torso under his coat.
LLEIDA, SPAIN Police on Monday escorted two trucks loaded with pieces of medieval religious art from a museum in the city of Lleida amid protests after a court ordered Catalan authorities to hand them over to the neighbouring regional government of Aragon.
Catalan regional police cordoned off the area around Lleida Museum from early Monday as technicians prepared to remove the 44 pieces, originally housed in Aragon’s Sijena monastery but bought by Catalonia from nuns in 1983.
In 2015 a court ruled the sale illegal and ordered the works returned.
Several hundred people, including many pro-Catalan independence supporters, turned up to protest the transfer and there were brief scuffles and police baton charges as officers tried to move them further away from the museum. The artwork was taken away in trucks escorted by Spanish Civil Guard police.
Both Aragon and Catalonia claim the art pieces are part of their respective cultural heritage.
The dispute has also become a political issue as it comes while Catalonia continues without a government and parliament after Spain dissolved both and called fresh elections for Dec. 21 in its crackdown on the region’s independence push.