New Jersey package contained multiple explosive devices

Multiple improvised explosive devices were found in a suspicious package in New Jersey, one of which detonated as bomb experts dealt with it, a local FBI branch said early Monday.

“There was a suspicious package with multiple improvised explosive devices this evening at the Elizabeth Train Station in NJ,” tweeted the FBI’s Newark office after the devices were found late Sunday.

“In the course of rendering one of the devices safe, it detonated,” the FBI said, adding that nobody was injured.

Earlier the mayor of the city of Elizabeth, Chris Bollwage, told journalists that two men walking near the train station had seen a package in a waste basket.

After noticing “wires and a pipe,” they alerted local police.

A local bomb squad responded to the scene and a drone examination found that “it could be suspicious and it could be a live bomb.”

The latest New Jersey investigation is underway amid heightened tensions after a blast in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood injured 29 people Saturday, four blocks from the discovery of a second bomb that was defused safely and sent to authorities for examination.

Earlier that day a pipe bomb went off in a trash can on the route of a Marine Corps run before it began on Saturday morning in Seaside Park, New Jersey, causing no injuries but forcing the race’s cancellation.

It remains unclear whether the suspicious backpack in Elizabeth was connected to any of those events.

Trains traveling through Elizabeth from New Jersey’s local transit line and Amtrak had been suspended, the mayor said.