Did police, district attorneys and Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg inflate the importance of a recent terror suspect arrest? A New York magazine report suggests that was possibility.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., and Mayor Bloomberg announced the arrest of Jose Pimentel at a city hall news conference Sunday night. But it turns out that the FBI had turned down requests to take part in the Pimentel investigation, citing some “issues” the agency had with the case.
“But more information on the seriousness of Pimentel’s threat, as suggested by the absence of the FBI in the investigation, could indicate that the arrest was more insignificant than it appeared last night,” New York magazine wrote.
Pimentel had been under investigation for more than two years. Bloomberg told the press the suspect had no connections to outside terror groups and was acting as “a total lone wolf.” Pimentel kept up the website www.trueislam1.com, which posted bomb-making directions from the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire, and had allegedly spoken of his desire to train in Yemen to carry out jihad in New York.
A law enforcement official, according to New York magazine, saw it this way: “We weren’t going to wait around to figure out what he wanted to do with his bombs. He was in Harlem about an hour from actually having assembled the bombs” at the time of his arrest, but had all the “unassembled components ready to go.”
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