NY bomb suspect arrested on plane

THE Times Square bomber was arrested at the last minute as his flight out of America taxied to the runway, police have revealed.

Pakistan-born US citizen Faisal Shahzad had booked his seat on the Dubai-bound plane as he travelled to New York’s Kennedy Airport and paid in cash.

Yesterday as he waited to make his first appearance in court he told investigators he was acting alone when he parked a makeshift car bomb in the heart of a packed Manhattan on Saturday evening.

But President Barack Obama said he was being checked for possible connection to terrorist groups.

Shahzad was removed from the Emirates flight after air traffic control ordered it to return shortly before take-off on Monday. He had been due to catch a Pakistan-bound flight from Dubai.

Shahzad became a naturalised US citizen last year shortly before travelling to Pakistan, where he has a wife, a security source said.

He was not known to US intelligence before the Times Square incident.

Speaking hours after the arrest, Obama said “justice will be done”.

The president said “hundreds of lives” may have been saved through quick action by ordinary citizens and local, state and federal authorities.

Meanwhile, police and the FBI searched Shahzad’s home in a working-class district of multi-family homes in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Shahzad bought the car used in the attempted attack, a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder, from a Connecticut man about three weeks ago and paid cash.

The vehicle identification number had been removed from the dashboard, but it was stamped on the engine, and investigators used it to find the previous owner, who told them he had sold it to a stranger.

The explosive device inside it had cheap-looking alarm clocks connected to a 1lb can filled with fireworks, which were apparently intended to detonate petrol cans and set propane tanks on fire in a chain reaction “to cause mayhem, to create casualties”, police commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

A metal rifle cabinet placed in the car’s cargo area was packed with fertiliser, but NYPD bomb experts believe it was not a type volatile enough to explode like the ammonium nitrate grade fertiliser used in previous terrorist bombings.

A passer-by alerted police to the car, which was smoking. Times Square, clogged with tourists, was shut down for 10 hours. A bomb squad dismantled the device.