Two men who found a bag containing a bomb in New York City on the night of an explosion that injured 31 people were in-flight security officers for EgyptAir, the airline said.
The men, Hassan Ali and Abou Bakr Radwan, had flown to New York from Cairo — and they served as unarmed security guards on the flight, The New York Times reports.
The EgyptAir officials identifying the men spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the issue, according to the report.
Ali and Radwan were seen on surveillance footage finding the travel bag on West 27th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood on Sept. 17, minutes after another bomb exploded on West 23rd Street.
The video showed the men pulling from the bag a white plastic bag that held a pressure-cooker bomb that was connected to wires and a cellphone, the Times reports.
They left the white bag on the sidewalk, taking the travel bag.
The device did not explode — and authorities have said that the men may have inadvertently disabled the device.
The bomb they found was among several that were allegedly made and placed to explode by Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, who was born in Afghanistan and later became an American citizen, the Times reports.
He was arrested after a shootout with police and has been charged on federal counts of planting bombs in New York and New Jersey.
The EgyptAir officials who spoke with the Times said they did not believe that their employees were connected to Rahami or the bomb plot.
"They didn’t know what was in it," one official said.
Ali "told me he saw it and thought it was nice," the official recalled. "He opened the bag to check it out and found a pot."
Ali did not want to fly the pot back to Egypt, the official said, so he just left with the travel bag.
"We see things left on the street in New York all the time," the official told the Times. "Stuff no one wants.
"It's normal to take them."
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