Taliban Tries to Hijack Times Square Bombing: Experts

Pakistan's Taliban did its best to claim credit(?) for Saturday's failed car bomb strike in Times Square, releasing three videos in rapid succession. One claimed outright responsibility for the attack, and two others starred Hakimullah Mehsud, the chief the US had thought it had killed. In a video allegedly taped April 4, Mehsud promised nonspecific attacks on US cities. “The good news will be heard within some days or weeks,” he said ominously.

But experts very much doubt the Taliban is behind it—or would even want to be. “I think there are elements in the TTP … who would like to see the TTP become an ally of global jihad and al-Qaeda,” the author of a book on the group tells the Christian Science Monitor. “And I don't think the bulk of Pakistani Taliban would want that.” The group has no capacity to launch international attacks, skeptics argue, but has a history of appropriating such events. (More Pakistani Taliban stories.)