NYC has mystery to solve

NEW YORK — Three abandoned devices that looked like pressure cookers caused an evacuation of a major New York City subway station and closed off an intersection in another part of town Friday morning before police determined the objects were not explosives.

Police were looking to talk to a man seen on surveillance video taking two of the objects — which police identified as rice cookers — out of a shopping cart and placing them in a subway station in lower Manhattan.

But police stressed that it wasn’t clear whether he was trying to frighten people or merely throwing the objects away.

“I would stop very short of calling him a suspect,” said John Miller, the New York Police Department’s top counterterror official. “It is possible that somebody put out a bunch of items in the Surveillance video captured a young man holding a cooker next to an elevator in lower Manhattan. Police want to question the man in their investigation into why three rice cookers were mysteriously found in the city Friday morning. It turned out they weren’t explosive.

trash today and this guy picked them up and then discarded them, or it’s possible that this was an intentional act.”

Many rice cookers look like pressure cookers, but the latter use pressure to cook food quickly — a function that has been used to turn them into bombs.

Police swarmed the initial finds around 7

a.m. on the mezzanine and platform of the Fulton Street station, a few blocks from the World Trade Center and New York Stock Exchange. About two hours later, a third rice cooker — the same make, year and model — was found about 2 miles away on a sidewalk in the Chelsea neighborhood.

Multiple subway lines

were partially suspended during the investigation at Fulton Street, and delays continued throughout the morning.

In September 2016, a pressure-cooker bomb went off in Chelsea, injuring 30 people. In 2013, pressure cookers packed with explosives killed three people and injured hundreds during the Boston Marathon.