Americans were shocked when what appeared to be a smoking car bomb was discovered Saturday night in New York’s Times Square — before it could explode and possibly murder many innocent people.
With astonishing speed, police arrested a suspect late Monday — as he was trying to board a Dubai-bound airliner at Kennedy Airport.
The suspect has been identified as Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born naturalized U.S. citizen.
The bomb scare began Saturday when a New York street vender spotted a “smoking” 1993 Nissan Pathfinder sports utility vehicle in a 95th Street parking place.
A police bomb squad found the vehicle had been loaded with gasoline cans, fireworks, propane gas tanks, fertilizer that might have been explosive but wasn’t, and alarm clocks.
If there had been an explosion, it might have sprayed shrapnel throughout a heavily populated area and killed many people. Fortunately, the car bomb didn’t explode.
The immediate “best clue” seemed to have been caught by a surveillance camera showing a man suspiciously changing shirts of different colors, as though to disguise his identity. But now it is reported he had nothing at all to do with the frightening event.
How were police able to act so quickly to identify a suspect and then intercept him before he could leave the country? Details are yet to follow his arrest by the FBI and New York police.
Shahzad reportedly had returned to the United States recently from a five-month trip to his native Pakistan. FBI agents searched his home at Bridgeport, Conn., from which they removed plastic bags of materials believed to be evidence, with details undisclosed.
The SUV in which the bomb materials were found had been purchased three weeks earlier for cash from a Connecticut man. Identification numbers had been removed from the SUV’s dashboard but remained on the car engine.
Many people who were in Times Square last Saturday — and millions of Americans throughout our country — have reasons for great relief that no deadly catastrophe took place, and that a suspect will be processed through our constitutional system with “due process of law” to assure that justice is done.