The FBI said late Sunday it had not charged anyone with a crime after reports said five people had been arrested over Saturday’s bomb blast in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. The New York Daily News reported Sunday evening that five people had been arrested in Brooklyn over the bombing that injured 29 people. Citing unnamed sources, the report said a group of people had been arrested near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge with a stash of weapons inside their SUV. New York State Sen. Marty Golden posted on his Instagram account that the FBI had made arrests of five people “with a possible connection to the bombing” at around 9:30 p.m. But the FBI’s New York office sent out a tweet saying, “We did a traffic stop of a vehicle of interest in the investigation. No one has been charged with any crime. The investigation is ongoing.”
The reported detentions came as police said they believed the explosive devices found over the weekend in New York and New Jersey may be linked, as investigators were seeking a man spotted at two different crime scenes in New York City, ABC News reported. Although the man has not yet been described as a person of interest in the Chelsea blast, police say he was seen in surveillance video in the area where the bomb went off in Manhattan and later a few blocks uptown, where a second device was found. Authorities also said the explosive devices used in both New Jersey and New York appeared to rely on flip cellphones to detonate, though the investigations were still being conducted separately. The New York City explosion Saturday night came just hours after a Marine Corps charity run in Seaside Park, New Jersey, was called off after a pipe bomb went off along the route of the 5K race.