A 26-year-old man was arrested and charged in New York for laying false bombs, the police said on Saturday (August 17th) after the discovery on the subway of three empty rice cookers the day before.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) detained Larry Griffin, a 26-year-old homeless man, and charged him with three counts of false bombing, according to a statement.
Manhattan had been on high alert for more than two hours on Friday morning after the rush hour meteorological discovery of three suspicious objects, which eventually turned out to be nothing more than empty rice cookers .
Rice cookers cause panic
Two abandoned cookers were spotted successively in the Fulton Street subway station near the World Trade Center and a third in the Chelsea area.
The Fulton Street metro station was quickly evacuated, traffic was interrupted on two subway lines and on several other lines also passing by this station the trains no longer marked the stop.
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The Logan County Sheriff's Office in West Virginia reported that Griffin had been arrested three times in the past eight years for various offenses and charged with possession of an illegal substance and for using obscene material to to seduce a minor.
Griffin was also under an arrest warrant for failing to report to the authorities while he was on parole before his trial, the sheriff's office said in a statement posted on Facebook.
Larry Griffin's mobile phone to put these rice cookers in places where they have created the fear of a bomb attack is unknown, according to US media.
"He had problems but he would not hurt anyone"
His brother Jason told the New York Times that he used to "pick things up" and said he found the cookers in front of a Japanese restaurant. Images of surveillance cameras at the Fulton Street station show a man taking out two cookers from a shopping cart and leaving them there.
Griffin's cousin Tara Brumfield told local radio station WSAZ3, "Little Larry is a good guy, he has had problems but he will not hurt anyone".