US: Police arrested two men on suspicion of plotting to bomb a New York subway station and other targets, but the case had no connection with this week's Republican convention or al- Qaeda, police said on Saturday.
They said that during a police investigation of a group of Muslim men in Brooklyn, one of them mentioned they wanted to bomb a train and drew up sketches of the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan.
New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said at a news briefing that the men had several targets.
They included two other subway stations, one of them in Times Square, and "three police stations on Staten Island, a prison and the Verrazano Bridge and they drew a map of the facilities."
He said the two men - an American and a Pakistani - had expressed anti-American and anti-Semitic sentiments and were arrested on Friday after a year of surveillance.
They made an initial appearance in US District Court in Brooklyn on Saturday.
"They had no connection to an international terrorist organisation and they had no explosives in their possession," Kelly said.
Law enforcement officials said the men were never close to carrying out the attack, and had no date in mind for any such attack.
The Herald Square subway station is only a block from Madison Square Garden, site of the four-day Republican national convention to nominate President George W. Bush for a second term in the White House which starts today.