BREAK IN BOSTON BOMB HUNT
Vid shows susp placing bag
BIG BROTHER was watching the Boston Marathon bomber — or bombers.
A security camera at a Boylston St. store taped a suspected terrorist planting a bag with a homemade bomb amid helpless spectators near the finish line, officials said Wednesday.
Also Wednesday, investigators began circulating photographs to federal and state agencies of two “possible suspects,” a law enforcement official reportedly told CNN.
The photos from moments before twin bombs exploded depict two men of “high interest” to investigators, including one carrying a black backpack, CNN said.
Authorities believe the bombs were hidden inside a black nylon backpack or bag, an FBI official reportedly said earlier.
The first big breaks in the vicious Patriots’ Day assault raised expectations for an arrest in the twin blasts that killed three innocent bystanders and injured another 183 — including a dozen who lost limbs.
Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.) was told by y federal officials that the noose was s tightening on the fugitive suspect as s the round-the-clock investigation en- tered its third day.
“I think they probably feel they’re e extremely close to it — they’re extreme- ly close to an arrest — and for whatever reason, it just hasn’t happened yet,” he told the Daily News.
Boston City Council President t Stephen Murphy echoed King, saying g authorities were optimistic after strik- ing gold amid a mountain of videos s and photos taken in the blast area.
Law enforcement has been pains- takingly sifting through photos and d combing videos frame by frame.
“They may be on the verge of arrestting someone,” Murphy said after a briefing with Boston police.
Police officials called the finish line e of the Boston Marathon one of the e most photographed stretches in Amerrica.
The bomber suspect caught on video was spied on footage shot from a Lord & Taylor store and was reporteddly wearing a black jacket, hooded d sweatshirt and white baseball cap.
The camera — across the street from the second blast — was first mounted on the store back in the 1980s to combat robberies, according to the Boston Herald.
Positioned about halfway between the two blast sites, it captured a single man dropping off a bag near the point of the second explosion. Then he walked off.
The man seen on the video matched the description of a suspicious individual identified by eyewitnesses.
It was initially unclear if the suspect acted alone or whether additional conspirators were lurking after the attack on one of the country’s biggest sporting events.
But leads that emerged late Wednesday, including the CNN report on the photos being circulated, pointed to the plot involving multiple individuals.
The CNN source said that authorities had yet to identify the two photographed suspects by name and that the photos were not being released to the public.It was not immediately known whether the man on the Lord & Taylor tape was one of men in the photos.
Investigators believe the murderous plotter or plotters loaded their homemade bombs into a pair of black backpacks before dropping the lethal packages about 100 yards apart. The explosives were detonated by timers.
Spectator Benjamin Thorndike snapped some of the most graphic and detailed pictures from his office overlooking the bombing. One picture captured a man — his pants blown off — running as the crowd cowers around him.
“His reflex is to sprint away, that really caught my eye. Everyone else in the photo is stunned, shocked and frozen,” he said.
Investigators also fanned out at Logan Airport in Boston in the hours after the attack, asking travelers to share videos or photos that might be of use in the probe.
The massive, 1,000-strong law enforcement team probing the attack had plenty of evidence to consider in their pursuit of both suspect and motive. A nearly mile-long stretch of Boylston St. remained closed as investigators continued their relentless hunt.
Investigators were also chasing down more than 2,000 tips collected in the first 24 hours after the explosion.
At the FBI lab in Quantico, Va., investigators were reassembling the bombs from evidence recovered at the blast sites near Copley Square. Forensic investigators were looking to see if they could detect a signa- ture in the devices.
A lid from one of the shrapnel-packed pressure cookers used to house the bombs was found Wednesday on a Boston rooftop and shipped south. Fagor America Inc., the maker of the pressure cookers used in the blasts, said the company was cooperating with the investigation.
Investigators also recovered pieces of BBs and nails from the bomb — some of it embedded in nearby buildings. Surgeons pulled nails and even a zipper from victims’ bodies and gave them to investigators.
“They’re going to go in and uncover or retrieve the explosive components, the detonator, the wiring, the explosive material, the packaging, everything down to the masking tape,” said ex-FBI agent James
McGee.
No group has taken responsibility for Monday’s mid-afternoon carnage, and officials have not indicated if the bombing was a domestic terrorism case. But McGee, formerly of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, said it appeared that way to him.
Now an antiterrorism consultant with the Soufan Group, he said the “somewhat amateurish” construction of the homemade bombs lead him to “lean toward domestic” terrorism. McGee said a more sophisticated bomb would have exploded with even more devastating results.
“The body count could have been much, much higher if they had used a different device,” he said. “When you start to talk about Al Qaeda, it’s usually all about body count. Here it didn’t seem to be that way.”
Word of a possible arrest came on the eve of President Obama’s trip to Boston for an interfaith service to honor those lost in the terror attack.
The FBI made no public statements Wednesday — canceling a pair of press conferences — other than to pointedly refute media reports of an arrest.
While a person of interest was not named, all three fatalities have been identified: 8-year-old Martin Richard, Krystle Campbell, 29, of Arlington, Mass., and Boston University graduate student Lu Lingzi, a native of China.
Reports Wednesday of a possible suspect preceded a chaotic scene at the Boston federal courthouse, where an unfounded bomb threat forced evacuation of the building.
But no suspect ever appeared at the courthouse, despite a massive gathering of reporters, photographers and camera crews.
Meanwhile, it was hardly business as usual for Boston businessman Colin Peddie, a self-proclaimed lucky guy whose sporting goods store is still a blood-spattered crime scene.
The 50-year-old owner of Marathon Sports and his son left the Boylston St. outlet just 30 minutes before Monday afternoon’s lethal blasts — and his 11 workers also escaped unscathed.
“It’s a miracle that no one was injured,” Peddie said Wednesday, referring to his employees.