Monday, Can’t Trust That Day

Phrases and words that shouldn’t be seen near each other include “explosion” and “building collapse”:

An explosion was heard before a fire and collapse at a 3-story building on Manhattan’s East Side on Monday, the Fire Department said.

Television reports said people were trapped inside, but fire officials did not immediately confirm that.

Heavy black smoke rose high above the building, wedged between taller structures on 62nd Street between Park and Madison avenues. Damage, including shattered windows, could be seen at one of the adjoining buildings.

The building reportedly housed a doctor’s office and a beauty salon.

Streets around the area were closed off to traffic as ambulances and rescue units responded just before 9 a.m.

Witnesses told reporters that they heard a loud explosion, but it wasn’t clear whether it was before or after the fire started.

Whoops, There It Is!

The group alleged to have planned to blow up the PATH train tunnel apparently got the map on the Department of Homeland Security’s website:

The tunnel terrorists got their maps of the region’s vital underground passageways off the Department of Homeland Security’s Web site, sources said yesterday.

Maps of the city’s tunnels — including subways, PATH tubes and the Holland Tunnel — were found with the group’s reputed mastermind in Beirut, and were e-mailed to other members of the group, officials said yesterday.

. . .

Homeland Security did not comment on the report that its own Web site was used by the terrorists.

Osama Not Only Paid For This Lap Dance — He Encouraged It!

Alleged Al Qaeda ringleader encouraged to teach economics courses in order to maintain “secular, fun-loving” cover:

The alleged ringleader of the tunnel terror plot lived the life of an international playboy — on orders from Al Qaeda.

Assem Hammoud, 31, even fooled his mother, if Lebanese police and U.S. anti-terror officials are correct.

His mother, Nabila Qotob, said Hammoud drinks alcohol, had girlfriends, traveled widely and showed no similarities to Islamic militants.

She also said Hammoud taught economics at a local university.

To prove her son was no jihadi, Qotob showed off photos yesterday of Hammoud with his father and lounging shirtless on a speeding motorboat in Germany.

There were also very un-Islamic pictures of Hammoud with three smiling women — none of them wearing veils — on his arm during an undated stay in Canada.

“His morale is high because he is confident he is innocent,” said Qotob, who said she had recently visited her son in jail.

But Lebanese police, who arrested Hammoud on April 27, said in a statement that the suspect claimed he had been ordered to maintain a fun-loving, secular lifestyle to hide his Islamic militancy.

“He did just that with perfection,” the police statement said.

I Told You So!

City officials say, “I told you so”:

New York tunnels, not Midwest corn fields, once again top the terror hit list, proving federal dollars should be dolled out according to need, officials said yesterday.

“We said continuously that when you catch a terrorist and look at the map in his or her pocket it is always a map of New York. Not a map of some other place,” Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.

“New York City, Washington, D.C., a handful of other large cities in the country remain the targets for terrorists because they symbolize America,” the mayor said.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the threat showed “New York still remains in the cross hairs of the terrorists.”

The commissioner bristled when a reporter asked whether the city leaked word of the threat to gain additional security funds.

“Totally untrue,” Kelly said.

B-Plus For Explosives Knowledge, F For Physics

Authorities are moving to break up a terrorist ring that aimed to blow up the Holland Tunnel:

The FBI has uncovered what officials consider a serious plot by jihadists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in hopes of causing a torrent of water to deluge lower Manhattan, the Daily News has learned.
The terrorists sought to drown the Financial District as New Orleans was by Hurricane Katrina, sources said. They also wanted to attack subways and other tunnels.

Counterterrorism officials are alarmed by the “lone wolf” terror plot because they allegedly got a pledge of financial and tactical support from Jordanian associates of top terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before he was killed in Iraq, a counterterrorism source told The News.

It’s not clear, however, if any cash or assistance was delivered.

The News has learned that at the request of U.S. officials, authorities in Beirut arrested one of the alleged conspirators, identified as Amir Andalousli, in recent months. Agents were scrambling yesterday to try to nab other suspects, sources said.

They didn’t indicate how many people were the target of the international dragnet but said they were scattered all over the world.

“This is an ongoing operation,” one source said.

U.S. agents were allowed to take part in the interrogation of Andalousli, a source said.

The alleged bombers had a small but significant obstacle standing in the way of their ultimate goal — basic physics:

Any plot to flood lower Manhattan by blowing up the Holland Tunnel is doomed to fail, experts say — because it would have to defy the laws of physics.

If the Hudson River surged into a ruptured tunnel, experts told the Daily News, the water would only rise to its own level — and might not even reach street level in the city.

“It might flood the Holland Tunnel, but that’s all it’s going to flood,” said Allan McDuffie, an Army Corps of Engineers expert on New York flood patterns. “It’s not going to get any higher than the level of the surrounding water.”

The sidewalk at the entrance to the Jersey-bound Holland Tunnel is exactly 10 feet above sea level, federal maps show.

The lowest points in the surrounding Tribeca neighborhood are the same height — along Canal St. from the West Side Highway to Wooster St., and in a nest of streets surrounding the Soho Grand hotel.

But even though Canal St. runs the route of an old canal, flooding experts say it’s only vulnerable to flooding from heavy rains or coastal storms — not from the river.

“There are ways that the city could get flooded, especially lower Manhattan, but I don’t think this is one of them,” said Irwin Redlener, head of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming “Americans at Risk.”

“It seems a little far-fetched. It’s not like the water is above the island,” Redlener said of the plot. “It doesn’t quite make sense.”