New York, Sep 10: Almost the entire police force of New York and Washington is out on the streets carrying out bag searches, bomb sweeps in parking lots and manning checkpoints to counter a “credible but unconfirmed” Al Qaeda threat of a terror strike in the twin cities.
Once again, New Yorkers are putting up with the inconveniences of snarled traffic caused by bridge checkpoints and bag searches at train stations.
Police planned a show of force at Grand Central Terminal, Pennsylvania Station and the Times Square subway station because of a previously planned counterterror drill with rail agencies.
Authorities were stopping vehicles at the 59th Street bridge, which connects Manhattan to Queens, causing a major backup.
The Brooklyn Bridge was down to one lane, and checkpoints were set up near Times Square and in other Midtown locations.
At Penn Station, transit police in helmets and bulletproof vests and carrying assault rifles watched the crowds.
Officials were swabbing passengers' bags near an escalator to the train platforms, and police searched the bags of passengers at the entrance to a subway station.
National Guard troops in camouflaged fatigues moved among the throng, eyeing packages.
Roseanne Lee, 64, said her taxi was stopped twice at police checkpoints on its way from the Upper East Side to Penn Station.
Police looked in the windows of the cab but did not question her or the driver, she said. At one checkpoint, police were searching a moving van, she said.
The delays turned a 15-minute ride into a 35-minute one and cost her $21 instead of the usual $12.”But I don't care,” Lee said. “It's better to be safe. You can't stop doing what you're doing because of these threats. You just have to be careful.”
District of Columbia Police Chief Cathy Lanier said officers would be working 12-hour shifts for the near future.
She said in a statement that the scheduling changes were “part of our plan” and that “maintaining a certain sense of unpredictability is essential to the success of any security plan.”
Officials in both cities were taking the threat seriously, and already-heightened security was beefed up even more.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Thursday night that police were increasing security at bridges and tunnels, setting up vehicle checkpoints, doing bomb sweeps of parking garages and towing more illegally parked cars.
U.S. officials said they were chasing a credible but unconfirmed al Qaeda threat to use a car bomb on bridges or tunnels in New York or Washington.
Residents in Washington, D.C., were also taking the latest threat in stride.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told “The Early Show” on Friday New York is one of the “safest place to be.We live in a dangerous world, we know that,” Bloomberg said.
“We also live in a city that is the symbol of freedom, of a lot of things that the terrorists don't like. So we always have an enormous amount of security here. We have the world's best police department. We work very closely with the FBI, and lots of other intelligence organizations.
“The level of security in this city probably makes New York the safest place to be,” he said, noting such security measures as surveillance cameras, radiation detectors, and the city's coordination with overseas police departments, the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
On Friday morning, the mayor rode the subway down to City Hall to help assure commuters the city was prepared.
“We don't want al Qaeda or any other organization ... to take away the freedoms without firing a shot,” he said after getting off the train near the Brooklyn Bridge.
Bloomberg urged New Yorkers to just “go back to work. And leave it to the professionals.”
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