Bombing underscores New York subway system’s vulnerability

NEW YORK (AP) — 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 system, 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 al- lows 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 radicial religious-inspired 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, who’s 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.