Terror in the Trunk

Since 9/11,both law enforcement officials and typical New Yorkers have worried and wondered—why not here? They were simpler propositions than hijacked planes,and they could,as a result,have an even more destabilising effect on the city and its residents.

Saturday night,however crudely imagined and ultimately botched,the threat of a car bomb hit New York—brought home on a busy street off Times Square in the form of a smoking Nissan Pathfinder loaded with propane,gasoline,fireworks and bags of what the authorities described as nonexplosive fertiliser.

The roughly fashioned device—wired with clocks and designed to,in the words of the police,“cause mayhem”—was dismantled before it could do harm. But for New Yorkers,it was an unsubtle and unsettling reminder that threats could be lurking in the trunks or back seats of any of the thousands of vehicles that push their way into the city every day.

“You know it’s coming,” said Konstantine Pinteris,42,a Greenwich Village psychotherapist who lives on the Lower East Side. “It’s in the back of your mind. All the time.”

Counterterrorism officials are ever wary of vehicular threats,as evidenced by the sidewalk barriers blocking access to sensitive buildings across the city,and by the Police Department’s determination to place hundreds of surveillance cameras in the city’s financial district.

And of course,the country is no stranger to huge vehicle bombs. The 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people. The first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 killed 6. In both,hundreds were injured.

But since 9/11,as car bombs have wreaked varying degrees of havoc in Baghdad and Kabul,Peshawar and Glasgow. New York has been free of that particular menace. Eerily so,for many.

“One of the things that’s striking is they’re incredibly effective,” said Gary LaFree,director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. “They’re very lethal. So why not in the US? That’s a great question.”

Lethal yes,in part because of their everyday quality and their mobility,said Jim Cavanaugh,a bomb expert who retired last month as head of the Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco,Firearms and Explosive’s Nashville field division.

“We call them vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices,” he said. “That’s sort of the inside baseball vernacular,but basically it’s a car bomb,and of course the reason the car is used is the delivery. It can carry the weight.”

From 1970 through 2007,terrorists used car bombs at least 1,495 times,according to research by the terrorism response centre in Maryland. The centre tracked 876 in the Middle East and North Africa,212 in Western Europe and 163 in South Asia.

Among the biggest culprits were the Irish Republican Army,the Basque Fatherland and Freedom in Spain,the Taliban,and al Qaeda in Mesopotamia,the centre found.

New Yorkers on Sunday had contradictory reactions to the failed attack. Many said they had grown accustomed to the fear of terrorist attacks,and they could not say they were truly surprised. Others,who said they had gotten used to the fact that no terrorist strike had succeeded in the city since the September 11 attacks,were now suddenly faced with a reminder of how suddenly and randomly it could happen.

But Michael Sheehan,the New York City Police Department’s top counterterrorism official from 2003 to 2006,said one reason car bombs have been rare in the United States is that they are harder to make and set off than people might think.

“They haven’t been able to do anything,and the reason is quite simply,in the US,they have not had the access to the training to put together a sophisticated bomb,” Sheehan said.

Sara Duffy,40,an interior designer who lives in the West Village,heard about the Times Square bomb on Sunday while at Washington Square Park with her two young daughters. Ms. Duffy,a lifelong New Yorker,said that she could still remember the smell of the smoke after 9/11,and that she worried about another attack for months afterward.

But she said that she had made an effort to put that worry behind her,and that at times lately,she had even thought that maybe airport security was too vigilant. “I feel like I have to protect my kids from feeling frightened all the time,” she said.

After hearing about the Times Square bomb,she said: “I think it’s a little alarming. I walk there all the time,but still I refuse to bow down to it.”