NYC Subway Station Evacuated due to Suspicious Package

Police say a major lower Manhattan subway station has been evacuated as they investigate two suspicious packages.

Police are researching the packages discovered on the line carrying trains No. 2 and 3 at the Fulton Street station. Authorities were called around 7 a.m. Friday.

There are no reports of injuries.

New York Police Counter Terrorism confirms the devices in a tweet, but says they are not explosives.

The station is a busy transit hub a few blocks from the World Trade Center.

‘Bomber Strikes Near Times Square’

In 2017, a would-be suicide attacker set off a homemade pipe bomb in an underground passageway at the Times Square subway station during rush hour, seriously injuring himself.

The attacker detonated a pipe bomb strapped to his body in the heart of Manhattan’s busiest subway corridor on December 11, sending thousands of terrified commuters fleeing the smoke-choked passageways, and bringing the heart of Midtown to a standstill as hundreds of police officers converged on Times Square and the surrounding streets.

But the makeshift weapon failed to fully detonate, and the attacker himself was the only one seriously injured in the blast, which unfolded just before 7:20 a.m.

Law enforcement officials said the attacker, identified by the police as Akayed Ullah, 27, chose the location because of its Christmas-themed posters, a motive that recalled strikes in Europe, and he told investigators that he set off his bomb in retaliation for United States airstrikes on ISIS targets in Syria and elsewhere.

It was the third attack in New York City since September 2016, and the second in two months, coming only weeks after eight people were killed in a truck attack along a Hudson River bike path. Like the earlier two, the attack were have been carried out by a so-called “lone-wolf” terrorist.

The method of attack — self-detonation, or the attempt at least — introduces something of a new element to a long history of the city as target, a place that has yet somehow avoided the bomb-wearing attackers that are the hallmark of terrorism in places like Israel and Nigeria.