Two dummy hand grenades that had been fashioned into crude bombs exploded outside the Mexican consulate in Manhattan at about 3:40am on Friday, authorities said. The attack bore a striking similarity to a blast two years ago outside an office building housing the British consulate.
Ramon Xilotl, the Mexican consul general, said three windows were shattered, but no one was in the building at the time, and no one was injured.
Law enforcement officials were investigating whether the attacks on the two consulates were the work of the same person, but stopped short of definitively linking them.
Nevertheless, they said the improvised explosive devices used in both cases were virtually identical. Both contained explosive powder. Both attacks occurred before dawn when there were few people on the street. And in both cases the devices were thrown against building facades, the first on March 5, 2005, at 845 Third Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets, and Friday's outside 27 East 39th Street near Madison Avenue, in Murray Hill.
In the 2005 explosion, surveillance videotape, along with other evidence, indicated that someone riding a bicycle had hurled a device at the building. The arc of the device -- with its lit fuse -- can be seen on the videotape.
In Friday's attack, a witness reported seeing a man in his 20s on a bicycle pedaling quickly away and turning south onto Park Avenue, the police said. The bicyclist was wearing a hooded gray jacket and his face was partly covered, but the police could not say for certain that he threw the grenades.
"There was a person seen on a bicycle today," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said at a news conference at police headquarters. "Two years ago, there were videos showing an individual on a bicycle."
The 2005 case is still considered an open investigation, Kelly said.
The explosions on Friday were also captured on surveillance videotape. The grenades were hurled over a wall topped by a fence; the first one, which fell in front of a picture window, exploded after the second one, which landed just west of a door.
Kelly described the two improvised explosives as training, or dummy, grenades -- perhaps purchased from a novelty shop -- that had been hollowed out and stuffed with gunpowder, possibly black powder, and equipped with pyrotechnic fuses. One had a smooth surface, modeled after the "lemon" type used in the Vietnam War, and the other was scored like the rough "pineapple" type used during World War II.
At a second news briefing, Kelly displayed grenades similar to those used in Friday's attack and said they could be purchased over the Internet. The devices used in 2005 were filled with a type of black powder and had M-80-type fuses.
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