Officers cleared the station, a busy transit complex where eight subway lines converge, and one train at the platform was evacuated while another was turned around and sent back, officials said.
An hour later, just as the police had determined the two devices were not explosives, they received another call alerting them to a third suspicious device placed by a garbage can farther uptown, in the Chelsea neighborhood.
By 10 a.m., officials announced that all three devices had turned out to be empty rice cookers that posed no danger. But by then the discovery of the appliances, which were initially believed to be pressure cookers, had disrupted commutes and created a flurry of police activity and news alerts that heightened fears and rattled New York City residents.
Officials said they were seeking a person of interest who was seen on video leaving the two devices on the subway platform at the Fulton Street station, though they cautioned that they did not know his intent and that he was not yet suspected of any criminal activity.
“The time, rush hour; the place, a subway station; the item, rice cookers that could be mistaken for pressure cookers,” said John Miller, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism. “It certainly is the kind of thing that we would want to know why is he placing them there and what is the purpose of that.”
The bomb scare echoed several incidents that have shaken residents in New York and elsewhere, including the use of pressure cookers in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and an explosion in Chelsea in 2016, as well as a subway bombing in Manhattan in 2017.
Miller said it was possible the rice cookers were in the trash “and this guy picked them up and discarded them.”
“As you all know,” he added, “there are people with shopping carts who pick up things on the street and put them back down on the street, and that’s kind of a fact of urban life.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.