FBI reveals details about Boston bombs
Police in Boston said they had found fragments of nylon bags, shrapnel and the remnants of a pressure cooker at the site ofMonday’s bombing, in the first signs of progress towards finding out who carried out an attack that President Barack Obama described as “an act of terror”.
Special agent Rick DesLauriers, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Boston office, said the bags containing the devices would have been heavy and appealed for members of the public to come forward with information about anyone seen carrying such a bag at around the time of the bombings.
Mr DesLauriers said the FBI and other investigators were undertaking the investigation – which has drawn in more than 1,000 investigators from 20 different agencies – “methodically, carefully, yet with a sense of urgency”.
The investigation was being undertaken throughout the US and abroad. However, Mr DesLauriers said the agency still had no specific suspect or suspects in mind and that there had been no claims of responsibility.
“The range of suspects and motives is wide open,” he said.
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Mr DesLauriers was speaking after President Obama said the authorities still did not have “a sense of motive” for what he called “a heinous and cowardly act”. The police did not know whether the two bombs were the work of foreign or domestic terrorists or “a malevolent individual”, the president said.
In another dramatic development, senators said late on Tuesday evening that a letter containing traces of ricin, or another poison, had been sent to a colleague, Roger Wicker, a Republican of Mississippi, although there was no immediate suggestion that it was linked to the bombings.
Boston police said 176 people were injured by the two explosions, which took place within 20 seconds of each other, with 17 people in a critical condition. Three people died, including Martin Richard, 8, and Krystle Campbell, 29, and a Boston University graduate student, identified by the Chinese Consulate in New York as a Chinese national, according to AP. Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that relatives had requested that the deceased not be identified.
Martin Richard’s mother and sister were seriously injured, according to a statement from Martin’s father.
In an indication of the skittish atmosphere across the country about potential further security threats, an aeroplane at Logan Airport in Boston was held on the ground while a section of New York’s LaGuardia airport was evacuated. Both situations were false alarms.
Mr DesLauriers said pieces of black nylon found at the scene could be from a backpack or other bag. There were also fragments of nail, pellets and parts of what might be a pressure cooker. He later clarified that he was referring to a single pressure cooker, but nylon bags at both sites.
Gene Marquez, head of the Boston office of the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which is also involved in the investigation, said bomb fragments had been recovered from the buildings along the marathon route, demonstrating the blasts’ ferocity.
Despite the huge investments in security since the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, security officials said the Boston marathon bombing appeared to represent the most vulnerable possible situation – a low-tech device left at an open event that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors across a large part of the city.
The initial details from the attacks give only small clues about potential suspects, according to security experts. There is a history of pressure cookers being used to make explosive devices in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, however such information would also be easily available to domestic terrorists as well.
“It is very early to say, but the fact that this took place on tax [filing] day and was a low-tech device seems to suggest it could be someone other than a conventional al-Qaeda attack,” said Juan Carlos Zarate, former deputy National Security Advisor for combating terror, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Over the last decade, Islamist terror groups had been eager to claim responsibility for attacks, he said. “We might have to get used to the idea that it could take weeks or even months” to solve the case, he said.
Tom Thurman, a former FBI explosives specialist who was involved in the investigations of the bombing of the PanAm flight over Lockerbie, Scotland and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, said the fact that the bombs produced white smoke indicated they were probably an improvised device. While military explosives such as C4 cause big plumes of black smoke, he said, white smoke was usually the result of a device that contained gunpowder or a commercial rock-blasting explosive such as dynamite.
The police did question a Saudi national who was at the scene of the bombings, however Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said that he was not a suspect.
While the FBI said it was pursuing a number of leads, former security officers warned that such cases can sometimes take a long time to resolve. It took the FBI seven years to capture anyone for the 1996 bombings at the Atlanta Olympic Games. Ed Davis, Boston’s police commissioner, said the scene of the explosions along Boylston Street in the city was “the most complex that we have dealt with in the history of our department”.
The size of the crime scene had already been cut from 15 to 12 blocks and would be further reduced in coming days in an effort to help businesses return to normal, the commissioner said.
In response to questions about the adequacy of security for the event, one of Boston’s biggest annual events, the commissioner said his department had conducted two sweeps of the area, one on Monday morning, the other two hours before runners started finishing, and had found nothing.
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