New York mayor vows to keep inner city safe

The Mayor of New York has promised additional surveillance cameras around Times Square and throughout the tourist heart of the city, as police struggled to come up with footage to aid the investigation into the failed bomb attack.

Investigators travelled to Pennsylvania yesterday to get footage from a tourist who claimed to have filmed a suspicious person at the time of the car bomb, while in the city local businesses were being asked to hand over security camera footage that may hold clues.

The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, promised scores more police cameras to add to the 82 that police have installed in the midtown area of the city, but which failed to capture the significant moments of the incident.

Police released CCTV footage of a man seen a short distance from the car, who is shown taking off a shirt and stuffing it into a bag, and glancing over his shoulder in the direction of the car.

The white male, in his 40s, was the nearest that surveillance cameras have been able to come to a possible suspect.

"There are millions of people who come through Times Square," Bloomberg said. "This person happened to be in a position in which a camera got a good shot of him, and maybe he had something to do with it, but there's a very good chance that he did not."

The 4WD's journey into Times Square was caught on camera for only a few seconds. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, the city installed thousands of cameras in Lower Manhattan, and the so-called "ring of steel" will also be extended into the midtown area that includes Times Square, following a federal grant.

It is that work that the mayor referred to yesterday as being of top priority.

The ring of steel also includes licence plate readers and chemical weapons detectors, and has attracted the ire of civil liberties groups, who are fighting in the courts to get more information on the project.

- INDEPENDENT