Three days after the Boston Marathon bombings, the Tsarnaev brothers "spontaneously" decided to drive to New York's Times Square in a hijacked SUV to explode their remaining bombs. But they were thwarted when the SUV owner escaped at a gas station, triggering a police car chase and shootout, New York City's mayor and police commissioner said Thursday.
"We don't know whether we would have been able to stop the terrorists had they arrived here from Boston, but we are just thankful that we didn't have to find out the answer," Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters.
He said the information was based on information that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old suspect charged with the Boston bombings, told federal and police investigators from his hospital room in Boston.
After two bombs killed three and wounded 264 near the finish line of the April 15 race, Tsarnaev and his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, still had six improvised explosive devices – one pressure cooker bomb and five pipe bombs, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said at the news conference. The brothers decided to head to New York.
The alleged plan went awry when the suspects realized the hijacked Mercedes SUV was low on gas and stopped at a filling station in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston, according to Bloomberg and Kelly. After the Tsarnaev brothers got out of the car, the driver slipped away and called police.
The incident occurred Thursday night, only hours after the FBI had released photos of the two suspects. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died from injuries suffered in an ensuing shootout early Friday morning.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, badly injured, fled the shootout in a second car and eventually hid in a boat in the back yard of a home in Watertown, where he was captured Friday night.
He was interrogated in his hospital room over a period of 16 hours without being read his constitutional right to remain silent. He stopped talking immediately after a federal magistrate judge and a representative from the U.S. Attorney's office came in and gave him the Miranda warning, according to a U.S. law enforcement official and others briefed on the interrogation.
In his initial interviews with investigators, the younger Tsarnaev said only that the pair intended to go to Manhattan "to party." The next day, according to Kelly, he changed his story and told them about the Times Square plan.
"In the car, they made a decision to go to New York, with the remaining explosive devices that they had and to detonate one or more in Times Square," Kelly said.
Kelly also noted that the Tsarnaev brothers had their pictures taken in Times Square in 2012 and earlier this year, but said he did not know if their presence was directly timed to any specific actions.
NBC News, which broke story about the New York City plan, quoted a senior law enforcement official as saying it appeared to be more "aspirational" in nature than concrete.
"There's no evidence at this time, however, to indicate that New York City is currently a target of another terrorist attack," Kelly said.
But Bloomberg stressed that the information relayed by the FBI, though sketchy, is being thoroughly investigated.
"The important thing for us is whenever we get information, we take it seriously," said Bloomberg.
He and Kelly stressed that the nation's largest police department carefully monitors Times Square, the site of a failed terrorist bombing effort in 2010.
Asked whether city police could have detected and stopped the Tsarnaevs in Times Square, Kelly said, "It's unknown. We have a lot of resources there, but there are no guarantees."
