was responsible for this did some planning certainly. got a license plate from a junkyard, tried to obliterate v.i.n. numbers, some vehicle identification numbers, to make the car harder to trace, so there was some planning here. the construction part was, fortunately, not a well thought out, not well planned. does that mean it s not al qaeda? not necessarily. it could have been al qaeda-inspired but it doesn t sound like whoever put this together knew much about explosives. again, i say fortunately. the v.i.n. number has been found. there are other places on cars that are not obvious to people where there are v.i.n. numbers. you can sort of take the car apart and find them and they have found some that will help enormously in the trace. as to whether other devices like this are planned around the country or attempted around the country, the homeland security secretary told me this morning no indication of that. no sign that there were any attempts like this anywhere else in new york o
here, is there an opportunity for investigators to pick up exactly who is behind this? there s going to be a ton of evidence in this, alex, and i think we will find out who did this. the vehicle itself will have identification numbers, although it has been tampered with. within the vehicle fingerprints, registration papers, even the materials put together all of those will have a trail of forensic evidence that hopefully will lead back to an individual. if it is a sole individual, it may take a while to find out who this person is. we ve been hearing from pete williams the v.i.n. numbers they thought had been obliterated and now they re finding them else or on the car. that will help trace down who is behind this. given the materials in the suv, michael, can you get a sense of how this detonated, how large was an explosion this would have
because the person, they told us that the fact that vin numbers were missing from that vehicle. and they did contact spun who plates are belonging to and for whatever reason may have been this vehicle came from a junkyard. and they said they re going to investigating that aspect of it. and this could have been a cat strofing event. something the mayor says resonate was me. saying to all citizens throughout this country. see something. say something. and thank god for that vendor tonight and that alert police officer. and because if this, ind sind yairy device would have exploded thousands of people could have been harmed. and i think what is very good
hours of saturday night as one of the things that was found inside that car. they described a box at the time, a box within a box. well, this metal box has not yet been opened by the police. investigators are still working on that. so that s why they are saying it has not yet been rendered safe. obviously, they want to see what s inside that thing. now, furthermore, just to clarify, the vin number that is removed from the nissan suv was not scratched on the car. it was on a metal strip. that strip is what was removed. as we also know, vin numbers are in different parts of the vehicle. there isn t just that one spot. they are working on that vin number, naturally, to trace it back, the history of this vehicle and eventually to get to the owner of it. some other information that we picked up. let s see, we know that cameras,
affiliate type of person. that s what, somebody who s a self-styled al qaeda affiliate or somebody who s actually gone to a training camp? how do you distinguish between that? in this case, this person has not been to a training camp. they might have been radicalized by friends or the internet, an increasing concern of officials in new york city. but he s self-radicalized, joined sort of the movement on his own but is not connected to the opportunities for training that they might get in afghanistan. if they had that opportunity, this would have been a more sophisticated device. so where do authorities go from here? they put together fingerprints, v.i.n. numbers a and all the like, but if that doesn t lead directly to somebody, how much can the security video from these surroundings buildings that just have these in the matter of due course, how much can that help? the security video is probably not going to be very likely to give up somebody by itself. but i d say a combination