Bombing underscores NYC subway system’s vulnerability
NEW YORK — The crude pipe bomb that exploded beneath the streets of New York this week served as a chilling reminder of the vulnerability of the city’s subway, a 24-hour-a-day operation with 472 stations and more than 5 million daily riders.
While police say the nation’s largest subway system has some of the tightest security possible that still allows busy New Yorkers to get where they’re going, they acknowledge they can’t be everywhere or anticipate every kind of attack, particularly in this era of lone-wolf terrorism.
“It’s very difficult and it’s getting harder,” John Miller, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, said on CBS’S “This Morning.” “This is not the al-qaida model, where a cell of people who are communicating with a base are an intelligence problem.” Instead, he said, the threat is coming from people “where the conspiracy is within the confines of their own mind.”
Investigators say that appears to be what happened Monday, when a Bangladeshi immigrant indoctrinated into terrorism through Internet videos strapped a bomb to his body and set it off in a busy passageway. He was the only one seriously hurt, suffering burns on his hands and torso.
Akayed Ullah, 27, was charged with federal terrorism-related offenses punishable by up to life in prison and was informed of the charges via video Wednesday as he lay in his hospital bed. He did not enter a plea and said little during the hearing, which lasted a little over 10 minutes.
It was the second lonewolf terror attack on the city in six weeks. On Oct. 31, a man in a rented truck mowed down cyclists and pedestrians on a crowded bike path, killing eight.
But the blast this week was the first bombing on the subway in 23 years, a streak police attribute in part to a multilayered security approach that begins with 3,000 officers underground every day, patrolling trains and platforms.
That’s bolstered by hundreds of security cameras, including one that captured detailed pictures of Monday’s explosion, and roving teams of officers with heavy weapons and dogs to sweep subway stations and trains. Officers are outfitted with pagersize radiation detectors to guard against a radioactive “dirty bomb.” Police also conduct tens of thousands of random bag searches in the system each year.
Yet those officers are confronted daily with thousands of people of every background, from every corner of the globe, carrying big backpacks, suitcases and large boxes, with no easy way of knowing whether any of those items contain a bomb.
As a result, police have to rely on riders as their eyes and ears, constantly reminding them, “If you see something, say something.”