Barrier of ’35 TONNE’ trucks due to shield Times Square from Berlin-style New Year attacks
MASSIVE lorries weighing 35 tonnes will surround Manhattan’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve in security measures designed to prevent a deadly Berlin-style truck attack.
By HARRY WALKER
Express.co.uk
Fri, Dec 30, 2016
New York Police Department will station 65 of the hulking vehicles – weighing 20 tonnes on their own and loaded with an extra 15 tonnes of sand – at intersections surrounding the iconic celebration in New York due to take place on Saturday evening.
The celebration is already a heavily policed event, with 7,000 officers deployed every year, including armed anti-terror units and bomb-sniffing dogs.
But in the wake of the sickening assault in Berlin, which left 12 dead after ISIS jihadi Anis Amri ploughed a truck into a busy Christmas market, NYPD Commissioner James O’Neil said US authorities must be vigilant.
He said: “We live in a changing world now. It can’t just be ‘What happens in New York, what happens in the United States?’ It has to be more ‘What happens worldwide?’”
New York police studied the atrocities in Berlin, as well as the more deadly assault in Nice that left 86 people dead when a man drove a 20-tonne refrigerated truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day, in order to effectively plan their security.
The Rest…HERE
