US law enforcement sources yesterday linked suspects in an alleged New York subway suicide bombing plot to a radical Palestinian group and officials said disaster was only hours away when police seized five bombs.
The mayor of New York, Mr Rudolph Giuliani, and the Police Commissioner, Mr Howard Safir, were also angry over a suggestion that one of three men arrested, Mr Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer (23), had filled out a US immigration application in which he stated that he had been arrested previously in Israel "and accused of being a member of a known terrorist organisation".
Officials told a news conference that a major explosion was prevented when police raided a Brooklyn apartment at dawn on Thursday, seizing five potentially deadly pipe bombs and arresting three Middle Eastern men, two of whom were shot and wounded.
The FBI and the New York City police claimed in a joint statement that the suspects intended to target "US and Jewish interests worldwide".
Law enforcement sources said investigators had evidence that the suspects made telephone calls to the Hamas organisation from stores near the apartment in the residential Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn.
But A New York lawyer for Mr Moussa Abu Marzook, leader of the political wing of Hamas, said that his client called the suspects "cowboys". A federal complaint filed on Thursday named Mr Mezer and Mr Lafi Khalil (22) as two of the suspects being held on criminal charges. A third suspect, not named by authorities, was being held as allegedly being in the United States illegally, officials said.