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Article snippet: Velcro. Zip ties. A pipe bomb. And, after the smoke cleared and the commuters ran, a man slumped over in a tunnel beneath Midtown Manhattan, his midsection blackened and bloodied from the force of an explosive device strapped to his own body. Of all the terrorist threats that loomed in New York in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, few were as worrisome to counterterrorism officials as a suicide bomber walking into one of the world’s busiest transit hubs. Despite a couple of recent terrorist attacks, and the more than two dozen plots that law enforcement agencies have thwarted here in the last 16 years, no one in that period did what the police have long feared: tried to blow himself up in a crowd. Until Monday. Akayed Ullah, an immigrant from Bangladesh, is the person officials said crossed that threshold when a pipe bomb tied to his body exploded in a passageway between the Times Square and Port Authority subway stations, in the first attempted suicide attack in New York City since Sept. 11. No one was gravely injured, and New Yorkers largely carried on with their commuting on Monday. But with the explosion, another chapter was added to a recent pattern of crude terrorist attacks in New York. No longer were suicide bombings only a gruesome hallmark of conflicts abroad — in post-invasion Iraq, for instance, or in Israel and the Palestinian territories. And no longer were the psychological ripples from such an attack — the eyeing of fellow subway riders, the suspic... Link to the full article to read more