Bomb scare in New York’s Union Square turns out to be a dud

NEW YORK - People in New York had another bomb scare when a couple of five gallon gas cans were found in the back seat of a car parked in Union Square last night.

It immediately prompted the evacuation of 600 people and briefly trapped hundreds of punk-rock fans attending a concert at Irving Plaza.

It later turned out the suspicious car was owned by a gardener who uses gas cans to fill his lawn mower.

The call first came in to cops at 10:16 p.m. from a Con Ed worker on his break who noticed the containers in the car parked in front of the building at 4 Irving Place.

Within moments, cops and bomb squad experts swarmed the area to check out the 1991 Oldsmobile.

The cops kept hundreds of fans inside Irving Plaza-where a Buzzcocks concert was about to let out-before finally letting them out the back door.

By midnight, the owner of the vehicle, who had been at the concert, returned and was none too happy-especially when he saw that cops had blown out his windows with two controlled blasts.

“What happened! What happened!” he kept asking police. “What’s wrong? I didn’t do anything.”

Police determined “there was no malicious intent” on the part of the gardener and declared an all-clear.

Thursday’s scare came almost two weeks after New York’s Time Square was sealed off after a parked SUV car caught fire. Police later discovered that the car was wired with explosives that contained fertiliser of not very good quality.

A search for the owner of the vehicle resulted in the arrest of a Pakistan-American Faisal Shahzad. He is currently under investigation. (ANI)