Around 7:30 A.M. on Monday morning, Camille Nankoo, a twenty-two-year-old from Brooklyn, was working in a Hudson Booksellers in the Port Authority bus terminal when she heard a deafening bang. “It sounded like a gunshot,” she said. “My ears were ringing.” Nankoo saw gray smoke billowing through a set of glass doors leading to a subway platform. Then, a crowd of people burst through the doors and ran past her storefront, shouting that someone had been shot. When Nankoo looked back toward the platform, she saw a man holding a handgun. She thinks now that he drew it in self-defense, or was a plainclothes police officer, but at the time she thought he was an active shooter. “My first instinct—everyone’s running—I just stand there,” she said. “I panic.”
The sound had actually come from an underground subway passage nearby, where Akayed Ullah, a twenty-seven-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh, had detonated a pipe bomb—the second major terrorist attack in the city in six weeks. Ullah has told investigators that he intended the attack as retaliation for U.S. airstrikes on ISIS compounds, and chose the location for its Christmas decorations. But the crude explosive—made from a broken Christmas-tree bulb, black powder, and a nine-volt battery—malfunctioned, blowing off its caps but failing to blast the pipe apart. Three passersby were taken to local hospitals to be treated for headaches and ringing ears. But Ullah, who suffering lacerations and burns on his hands and abdomen, was the only person seriously injured. The police quickly took him into custody. Still, the botched attack shut down one of the city’s largest transportation hubs, and sparked panic across midtown Manhattan.
After the blast, Nankoo watched heavily armed soldiers dressed in camouflage run onto the platform, and repeated to herself, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.” The storefront had a metal grille that workers closed at night, and she thought that maybe she could pull it down and lock herself inside, but found she didn’t know how to operate it. She called a co-worker for help but got no answer. Instead, she ducked behind the register and curled up under the counter. She stayed there until a human-resources representative from the company found her and helped her evacuate.
When Nankoo looked at her phone, she found “literally forty” missed calls from her parents. Her thirteen-year-old sister had called from her school in Park Slope. “I didn’t even think she knew I worked in Port Authority,” she said. Nankoo’s job with Hudson is one of her first; she started only four months ago. “I was always scared to work at Port Authority,” she said. “Forty-second Street has been, and always will be, a target. I just didn’t think that I, of all of the employees, would be there right next to it.”
Amitha Mabulage, a middle-aged woman with thick glasses, was working behind the counter of a different Hudson Booksellers shop—there are ten in Port Authority—when she heard the explosion and saw the stampede of frightened commuters. “Everybody is saying, ‘Shooting, shooting, shooting!’” Mabulage said. She ran to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts, and joined a group of workers hiding inside the kitchen’s walk-in refrigerator. They stayed barricaded in the frigid room, surrounded by donut dough and jugs of milk, for ten or fifteen minutes, until police arrived and told them that the situation was under control. Mabulage has worked at Port Authority for thirteen years, but said that she has never seen a day like this. “Today, I might have died,” she said.
Gus Kalant, who runs Sak’s Florist on the second floor, said “it was pandemonium.” Kalant had been in the middle of setting up shop when the attack happened, and he watched people clamber up the escalator in front of his shop, trampling over one another to get to the exit. “That feeling—when you see that happening and everyone’s panicking—it’s disturbing,” he said. “I just hope that it doesn’t happen again.”
Officials said that Ullah had lived as a permanent resident in Brooklyn since 2011, and worked as a car-service driver. He seems to have acted alone; he told investigators that he learned how to build a bomb online, purchased his own materials, and assembled the explosive in his home. The incident occurred only six weeks after a man killed eight pedestrians when he drove a rented truck down a bicycle path in Lower Manhattan, and officials expressed relief that the toll from this attack was not higher. “This is in many ways one of our worst nightmares,” Governor Andrew Cuomo said at a press conference today. “The reality turned out better than the initial expectation and fear.”
Outside of Port Authority, the doors were locked and the streets were blocked off. Dozens of police cars and fire trucks, some adorned with Christmas wreaths, surrounded the terminal. Sara Hdija, a Montessori schoolteacher, had been in the Duane Reade in Port Authority when the explosion happened. In the chaos of the evacuation, she had forgotten her wallet on the pharmacy’s counter, and was now separated from it by a line of armed guards. “It’s that kind of Monday,” she said. The wallet contained her metro card and money, so she had no way to get to her class in Brooklyn. “It’s pajama day there, so I’m missing that,” she said. She spoke of the attack with resignation. “I mean it’s crazy, it’s horrible, but I feel like we’ve gotten to the point where it’s like, ‘We’re due for another one,’” she said. “And it doesn’t seem like it’s going to slow down.” Kari Streeter, a fifty-one-year-old office manager for an accounting firm in midtown, called the incident frightening but vowed to continue her daily commute through the Port Authority. “It’s a little scary, but crazy things happen in New York City,” she said, laughing. “I’m gonna go work today, go home, and do the exact same thing tomorrow.”
Stranded travellers wandered the streets with rolling suitcases, and loitered in nearby restaurants. Katerina, a forty-three-year-old woman who declined to give her last name, waited in a coffee shop with her seventy-year-old father, Termuri, who had just arrived from the nation of Georgia. “In Eastern Europe, there was the war between Georgia and Russia,” Katerina said. “But, now, nothing like this.” Termuri was hoping to board a bus to visit family in Toronto, and Katerina said, “I told him, ‘Don’t be afraid, you are in good hands. The New York police are very quick.’” Down the street, Leon and Carolina Flores sat serenely in a McDonald’s. They had flown in from Caracas, Venezuela, that morning, and were hoping to catch a bus to Wilmington, Delaware. “No one seems scared, so we’re not scared,” Leon said, shrugging. “If everyone is acting normal, we figure there is nothing to be scared about. So we’re just waiting.”
Joe Little, a retired housekeeper with salt-and-pepper scruff, huddled in the lobby of a TD Bank with a half-dozen other thwarted travellers. He and his wife had recently separated, and that morning he had planned on moving to Montgomery, Alabama, for a fresh start. When the explosion happened, Little had been sitting at a gate in Port Authority, waiting to board a 9 A.M. bus. Police had forced him to evacuate the building, so he had trudged down the street, following the crowds. A little after noon, he heard a rumor that the Port Authority was re-opening and that his bus would soon board. He hoisted his bags onto his shoulders and headed back toward the station. “Going home for good,” he said. He reflected that the attack had happened during his final moments living in New York. “I’m just blessed that he didn’t blow up the Port Authority,” he said with a smile. “So I can leave.”
This story has been updated with additional reporting.