An incendiary device was detonated outside 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan this morning. That building is the headquarters of the FBI’s New York Field Office, among other federal agencies. So far, there are no reported injuries.
The federal building was one of the New York City landmarks surveilled in 1993 by jihadists from the cell of the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman), whom I later prosecuted for seditious conspiracy. As Noah relates in his fabulous book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, jihadists are far from the only radicals who’ve conducted such attacks. Indeed, over a decade before the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (which includes the NYPD and other law enforcement and intelligence components) was established in lower Manhattan during the era of left-wing violence. (In our pages back in 2015, I reviewed Bryan Burrough’s excellent book on the Weather Underground and other terrorist groups of the era, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.)
The New York Post reports that there is an unidentified man in custody (there is a photo of police carting him away). The Post, citing police and other sources, says, “The unidentified man started a fire outside of 26 Federal Plaza around 8:30 a.m., ignited fireworks and threatened passersby with airsoft rifles.”
It’s obviously too early to tell whether this is a one-off, whether the apparent attacker was acting alone, and how serious the threat is (or was).