A section of New York's Pennsylvania Station, a key East Coast transportation hub, was briefly sealed off today because of a suspicious item on a public concourse as the city remained on high alert due to a threat to its subway system.
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| A New York City police officer searches the bag of a subway passenger |
Police sealed off part of the station and officers dressed in hazardous materials suits and officers with explosive-sniffing dogs searched the main concourse that serves Amtrak, the national passenger railroad. Nearby, coffee-sipping commuters rushed off to work.
Despite the warning yesterday from city and federal officials that a specific threat to the vast subway system had been detected, millions of New Yorkers and suburban commuters -- some jittery, others stoic -- returned to their traveling routines today.
Officials would not say what led to the Penn Station precaution, but one Amtrak officer at the scene told Reuters, "It was a soda can with a green liquid bubbling out, but it doesn't seem to be anything." By late morning, passenger were free to move freely. Amtrak operations were never disrupted.
An intelligence source in Washington said the wider alert of a threat to America's largest subway system came from intelligence in Iraq.
"Raids in Iraq in recent days or weeks did produce intelligence that led to the New York City terror threat alert," said an intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Uniformed police stepped up searches of bags and increased their presence at subway stations a day after Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plea to commuters to leave their luggage, backpacks and baby strollers at home.