Scroll for updates…

A backpack explosion at 4am PST this morning. One dead:

A backpack exploded in a parking garage attached to a Las Vegas hotel early Monday, killing a man who had picked it up and injuring another person, authorities said.

The man had removed the backpack from atop his car when it exploded shortly after 4 a.m. on the second floor of a parking behind the Luxor hotel-casino, said Officer Bill Cassell, a police spokesman.

The second person was taken to an area hospital.

Aerial video showed no apparent damage to the parking structure, where entrances were blocked while police, firefighters and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents investigated. No further information was immediately available.

11am Eastern update: Still sketchy details. Las Vegas readers, keep us posted.

11:29am Eastern update. Reader David e-mails: “KLAS-TV says the victim was an employee of the hotel.” KLAS reports:

There was a deadly explosion early Monday morning on the top level of the parking structure located at the Luxor Hotel & Casino. The victim of the bombing was an employee of the Luxor.

The explosion happened around 4 a.m. Reports were that the device was inside a backpack, which was on the vehicle. When the employee went to remove the object, the explosive went off. The employee was taken to the hospital where he died.

Officials say the victim appears to have been the intended target.

12:15pm Eastern update: Not a backpack. Not terrorism, say officials.

***

This incident may or may not have anything to do with al Qaeda terrorism. But this flashback bears noting: Remember the terror casing videos of the Luxor Hotel disclosed by the feds in 2004?

When Spanish authorities uncovered al Qaeda surveillance of major American landmarks in summer 2002, California officials issued a public warning and doubled police security on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge because it appeared in the videos.

Alerted around the same time to the Spanish footage as well as a second surveillance tape found in the apartment of a Detroit terror cell, Las Vegas authorities chose a private briefing to casino security chiefs and no public alerts.

The latter response has put authorities in America’s gambling capital on the defensive after Justice Department documents and a federal prosecutor emerged this week to suggest Las Vegas’ decision may have had to do with concerns about tourism or the casinos’ legal liability.

On Tuesday night, FBI and police officials in Las Vegas gave their own account after a federal judge granted them permission to talk despite a gag order in the Detroit terror case last year that produced much of the video evidence.

The officials confirmed that Las Vegas authorities, including casino officials, were shown the video surveillance in fall 2002 but they decided against public warnings, even though both tapes showed casing footage of the same three casinos.

“We don’t dispute those were surveillance tapes,” FBI special agent David Nanz said Tuesday night in Las Vegas.

Another flashback: The 9/11 hijackers in Las Vegas, via the LV Review-Journal…

The intelligence community still is puzzling over why Mohammed Atta and four of his accomplices made several trips to Las Vegas in the months leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Ellen Knowlton, former head of the FBI’s Las Vegas office, said she expects the quest for answers will continue.

“It was pursued as aggressively as humanly possible,” said Knowlton, who retired from the FBI in February. “It will never be closed until it’s solved.”

In its July 2004 report, the 9/11 Commission wrote of the six different trips, “Beyond Las Vegas’ reputation for welcoming tourists, we have seen no credible evidence explaining why, on this occasion and others, the operatives flew to or met in Las Vegas.”

Adding to the mystery is the fact that all four hijackers who piloted the doomed aircraft spent time near Las Vegas Boulevard.

The lack of definitive answers hasn’t kept current and former law enforcement from theorizing about the visits, the last of which took place less than a month before the attacks.

Former Clark County Sheriff Jerry Keller said he thinks the hijackers were eyeing Las Vegas for a possible future attack involving other al-Qaida members.

“We had to be a collateral target or they wouldn’t have been here,” Keller said.

Grant Ashley, the FBI’s special agent in charge in Las Vegas at the time of the attacks, said he has come to view the visits as “planning summits.”

comments (0)   trackbacks (6)