Police release photo of man sought in Fulton Street subway station bomb scare

Police released a photo of a man in connection with two rice cookers that were left unattended in the Fulton Street subway station, which prompted an investigation that shut down the station and diverted multiple train lines. 

Police investigated three unattended rice cookers in total on Friday morning. The man in the photo is only wanted for questioning for the two that were found at the Fulton Street station. 

The man was seen on surveillance taking two rice cookers out of a shopping cart and placing them in the subway station. But police emphasized that so far, it wasn’t clear whether he was trying to frighten people or merely throwing the objects away.

“I would stop very short of calling him a suspect,” said John Miller, top New York Police Department counterterror official. “But we need to know the facts behind this.”

“It is possible that somebody put out a bunch of items in the trash today and this guy picked them up and then discarded them, or it’s possible that this was an intentional act,” he said.

The man in a photo has a thin build, short, curly dark brown hair and has a crescent-shaped tattoo on his upper right arm. He was wearing a navy shirt that read "Prime Day" and can be seen carrying a rice cooker in the photo. 

The New York City Police bomb squad cleared the two rice cookers  Friday morning after an investigation shut down Fulton Street subway station and diverted multiple train lines for about three hours, authorities said. 

Minutes after a bomb squad cleared the two rice cookers at the Fulton Street station, a third one was found and investigated at the corner of 7th Avenue and West 16th Street.

The NYPD tweeted that the rice cooker was deemed safe at 9:19 a.m. Friday morning.

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All affected train lines resumed normal service at 10:24 a.m., the New York City Subway tweeted. 

The rice cookers appeared to be pressure cookers left by a stairway. The NYPD counter terrorism unit deemed them safe at 8:17 a.m. Friday morning. Officers searched nearby stations out of an abundance of caution, police said. 

Authorities were investigating whether they were deliberately placed to spark fear.

“The suspicion is that they were placed there to suggest that they were electronic devices and possible bombs,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on WCBS-AM.

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The scare comes the week after a shooting scare in Times Square, where the sound of a backfiring motorcycle sent a crowd into panic in fear of a live shooter.

Michael Oji, a New Jersey resident who works in lower Manhattan, said he’s lived in the metro area for more than 20 years and saw the additional security that came to the area after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“This is supposed to be the safest part of the world, but when you see this, it’s a little bit unnerving,” he said just outside an entrance to the station that had been closed off by armed officers. “Going to work in the morning, thinking that everything’s OK, and you run into something like this, it’s scary.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio thanked both police “and everyone who kept calm through this.”

In September 2016, a pressure-cooker bomb went off in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, injuring 30 people. The bomber, Ahmad Khan Rahimi, also planted a second pressure-cooker bomb nearby that never exploded and a small pipe bomb that went off along a Marine Corps road race in Seaside Park, frightening participants but injuring no one.

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The Afghanistan-born Rahimi, who had been inspired by propaganda from al-Qaida and the Islamic State group, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

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

Prosecutors said the Bangladeshi-born Ullah was stirred by the Islamic State, but he said he was angry at President Donald Trump over his Middle East policies.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

Check back on this developing story.