Five suspected explosive devices have been found in a backpack near a train station in New Jersey as the security alert gripping America ratcheted up in the wake of the Manhattan bombing.
One of the devices exploded when a bomb squad robot tried to disarm it near Elizabeth train station, Associated Press reported the local mayor as saying.
Christian Bollwage said that the device exploded shortly after 12:30am on Monday. The FBI was leading the investigation and working to disarm the other four devices.
Bollwage told CNN: “The robots that were going it to disarm it cut a wire and it exploded. I don’t know the technological aspect of that. I know there are other devices. I don’t know what they are made up of but they are going to have to be removed and all the fragments from the other pieces are going to have to be picked up so the FBI can investigate this fully.”
He told NBC: “Based on the loudness, I think people could have been severely hurt or injured if they had been in the vicinity.”
There were no reports of injuries. Bollwage said to expect more detonations.
He said two men called police and reported seeing wires and a pipe coming out of a package after finding it around 8.30pm on Sunday.
New Jersey Transit said services were suspended between Newark Liberty airport and Elizabeth while New Jersey-bound Amtrak trains were being held at New YorkPenn station.
An FBI spokesman in Newark, Mike Whitaker, said: “We are responding with our local law enforcement partners,” but declined to give further details.
Investigators earlier said that the bomb that rocked Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood contained residue of an explosive often used for target practice as investigators followed multiple leads into the attack.
The bomb on Saturday night that injured 29 people was made with a pressure cooker, cellphone, Christmas lights and packed with shrapnel – the same construction as an unexploded device found a few blocks away, according to separate reports.
The evidence of Tannerite – a black powder that can be picked up in many sporting goods stores and is used to mark a shot – may be important as authorities piece together Saturday’s events and examine whether they were linked to a pipe bomb blast in a New Jersey shore town earlier in the day.
New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, touring the site of the Manhattan blast, said there did not appear to be any link to international terrorism. He said the second device appeared “similar in design” to the first, but did not provide details.
“We’re going to be very careful and patient to get to the full truth here,” New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said on Sunday. “We have more work to do to be able to say what kind of motivation was behind this. Was it a political motivation? A personal motivation? What was it? We do not know that yet.”
Cellphones were discovered at the site of both bombings, but no Tannerite residue was identified in the New Jersey bomb remnants, in which a black powder was detected, said the official, who spoke to Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
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