New York – A manhunt was on for the mystery assailant behind the rush hour mass shooting in the city’s underground transit system that left 10 people with gunshot wounds and at least 13 others with other injuries.
Police Commissioner Keetchan Sewell said on Tuesday that terrorism was not being pursued for the moment as the motive, although nothing has been ruled out.
Officials from the city and the federal government investigating the morning shooting which seemed to be meticulously planned were puzzled by what triggered the attack.
A shooting or other mayhem with mass casualties is usually not considered by authorities as terrorism unless motivated by a definite political, religious or race agenda.
Although 33 shots had been fired, no one has died while five of those hit by bullets were reported to be in a critical condition.
A 9mm Glock gun mounted with an extended magazine that had jammed was found on the train, according to police.
That the gun jammed may have prevented greater mayhem.
The other 13 victims were injured by shrapnel or had been overcome by smoke or wounded during the scramble, according to the Fire Department which manages the ambulance service.
Videos and pictures posted by eyewitnesses showed victims lying on the blood-splattered train platform and train car and tended to by fellow passengers.
Some of the wounded passengers and others rushed to a train on the opposite side of the platform from the one that had been attacked and were taken to the next station for safety by the train workers.
Describing the attack, Sewell said that the shooter, whom she said was African American, put on a green vest and a gas mask as the train was pulling into a station before setting off a smoke canister, opening fire in the chaos that followed and disappearing into the station.
Mayor Eric Adams said that the surveillance cameras in the station in the city’s Brooklyn borough were apparently not working.
Police scrambled to get videos from nearby businesses.
Police said they also found two more magazines and a bag containing firecrackers, smoke bombs and a hatchet.
The key to a rented van found among the belongings abandoned by the suspect led police to look for a man from Philadelphia as a “person of interest” — meaning they did not have enough evidence to charge him right away but would need to question him.
The man, Frank R. James, was reported to have ranted on social media against the city’s Democratic Party mayor, an African American himself, who is taking strong steps to curb the rising tide of crimes, and about the problems of homeless people, whom the mayor has ordered removed from the trains and stations.
The city’s train transit system known as the subway, even though a substantial part of it runs overground on elevated tracks, has little security despite being considered a terrorist target.
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