The two men suspected of carrying out last week's deadly Boston
Marathon bombing decided after authorities identified them to drive to
New York and set off additional explosives in Times Square, New York
City officials said on Thursday.Their plan
unraveled only when they realized that a Mercedes sports-utility vehicle
they had hijacked on April 18 three days after the bombing did not have
enough gasoline for the journey, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.
He
said investigators learned of this plan while questioning the surviving
suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in his hospital bed in Boston.
He has been recovering from his wounds there since being captured on
Friday night after an all-day manhunt that shut down much of Boston.
"Questioning
of Dzhokhar revealed that he and his brother decided spontaneously on
Times Square as a target," Kelly said at a news conference with Mayor
Michael Bloomberg. "They would drive to Times Square that same night.
"That
plan, however, fell apart when they realized that the vehicle that they
hijacked was low on gas and ordered the driver to stop at a nearby gas
station.
At the time, the men still had six
explosive devices, including a pressure-cooker bomb of the type used at
the marathon and six pipe bombs, Kelly said.
When
they stopped to fill up the vehicle, the driver of the car escaped. He
alerted authorities and sparked a massive late-night car chase across
the university town of Cambridge, where police said the brothers shot
dead a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer.
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