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 News from Around the Americas | October 2007 
Police Eye Connections in Manhattan Consulate Explosions
 Tom Hays - Associated Press
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| | An NYPD police officer closes the block containing the Mexican Consulate on East 39th Street in New York, October 26, 2007. Police were investigating the explosion of two makeshift explosive devices outside the Mexican Consulate in New York on Friday, police said. (Reuters/Jeff Zelevansky) |
New York - If the two small explosives tossed over a fence at the Mexican consulate were meant to deliver a message, it was a cryptic one.
No threats had been made against the consulate, and no one took responsibility for the explosion, police said. The blast shattered three windows but caused no injuries.
There was no obvious motive, but investigators were exploring whether the attack Friday could have been connected to a strikingly similar incident at the British consulate in 2005. Police officials said they were also considering the possibility that Friday's attack was tied to the approaching anniversary of the death of Bradley Roland Will, a journalist-activist from New York who was killed in the Mexico.
Mexican officials said the consulate would reopen on Saturday. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the explosion at 3:30 a.m. Friday "was relatively small, minimal" - so minimal that the attack wasn't reported for hours. Apparently, employees working at the consulate didn't even hear the blast, police said.
The commissioner also said a witness early Friday reported seeing someone on a bike near the consulate, located in the middle of East 39th Street between Madison and Park avenues.
In the incident at the British Consulate, the explosions took place in the early morning hours of May 5, 2005, when Britons were going to the polls in an election that returned Prime Minister Tony Blair to power.
In both cases, the instruments were fake grenades sometimes sold as novelty items. They were packed with black power and detonated with fuses, but incapable of causing serious harm, police said.
"It looks like two very similar instruments were used," Kelly said.
Security videotapes from the 2005 scene suggested the two grenades were thrown from a distance. Some showed the devices, fuses lit, arching toward the building and landing in or near a cement security planter, police said.
Investigators say the videos also hinted at who may have been the thrower: a cyclist seen circling the block moments before the devices went off. Afterward, a trail of cameras captured pictures of him pedaling north and west about 40 blocks. Then, he vanished.
Another possible link in Friday's explosion was Will's death. He was killed in the Mexican city of Oaxaca on Oct. 27, 2006, while filming a clash between demonstrators and gunmen.
Activists have claimed Will was killed by government troops. State investigators in Mexico arrested two town officials in the killing, but released them after prosecutors suggested Will might have been shot by a protester.
Associated Press Writer Amy Westfeldt contributed to this report. |
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