Replica shows NY bomb could have killed

New York: Investigators detonated a working replica of the car bomb used in the failed Times Square terror attack, creating a large explosion that destroyed other vehicles and scattered flaming debris, law enforcement officials have said.

The test in central Pennsylvania showed that the homemade bomb, had it been constructed and detonated properly, would have killed or wounded an untold number of pedestrians and damaged buildings along the block where the car was abandoned by Faisal Shahzad on May 1, the officials said.

“It would have been extremely deadly,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday when asked about the test after an event at a Washington think tank.

Kelly didn’t go into specifics about the FBI test. But two other officials told that it was conducted late last month in a remote area, 48 kilometres outside of State College, Pennsylvania, and that a video of it was played for a gathering of authorities earlier this week.

The officials spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly about the test. The FBI’s New York office declined to comment.

The test was first reported yesterday in the New York Post, which quoted an unnamed source saying that the results suggested the bomb could have been more deadly than the 1995 Oklahoma City car bombing that killed 168 people.

One of the officials who spoke to the AP said that was an exaggeration, because the Oklahoma City bomb — also made of fertiliser — was roughly 10 times larger than the one left in Times Square.

Calling himself a “Muslim soldier,” Shahzad pleaded guilty June 21. During his plea hearing, the 30-year-old traced his plot to a 2009 trip to Pakistan, where he said he received explosives training and funding from the Pakistani Taliban for his one-man scheme.

He returned to the United States and loaded a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder with a fertiliser-fuelled bomb packed in a gun cabinet, a set of propane tanks and gas canisters rigged with fireworks that he hoped would cause a chain-reaction explosion.