A vehicle exploded in Niagara Falls, causing a fire and killing two people on Rainbow Bridge at the US-Canada border.
The car sped toward the bridge and exploded on the American side of the checkpoint on Wednesday morning, according to law enforcement officials.
Surveillance footage from the US government showed vehicle on a wet road going through an intersection, then hitting a low median and sailing through the air east of the main US Customs and Border Protection checkpoint. It smashed into a row of inspection booths.
‘You actually had to look at it and say, “Was this generated by AI?”‘ said New York Governor Kathy Hochul. ‘Because it was so surreal to see how high in the air this vehicle went and then the crash and explosion and the fire.’
The driver and passenger were killed, Hochul said. One of them was a resident of western New York.
‘Based on what we know at this moment, there is no sign of terrorist activity in this crash,’ the governor said.
In Buffalo, Erie Country Sheriff John Garcia said: ‘We can go on with our lives.’
The crash that drew fears of terrorism on both sides of the border amid a travel rush at the start of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
Two witnesses said they heard a loud noise and that a massive smoke cloud formed near the inspections station around 11.20am, according to the Niagara Gazette.
‘We heard something smash,’ said one of the witnesses, Ivan Vitalii who was visiting from Ukraine. ‘We saw fire and big, black smoke.’
Another bystander, Mike Guenther, said he observed a car speeding from the US side to the border crossing and saw it swerve to avoid another vehicle and smash into a fence.
‘All of a sudden he went up in the air and then it was a ball of fire like 30 or 40 feet high,’ he told WGRZ. ‘I never saw anything like it.’
Rainbow Bridge was closed to traffic and a Niagara Falls Police Department captain directed away motorists and pedestrians near the inspections plaza.
President Joe Biden said he was ‘closely following developments’.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed the explosion on Wednesday afternoon.
‘This is obviously a very serious situation in Niagara Falls,’ he said in Parliament. ‘We are taking this extraordinary seriously.’
What caused the explosion was not immediately known.
All four border crossings by land between the US and Canada have been shuttered, according to the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission. The other three crossings are at Peace Bridge, Lewiston and Whirlpool.
Hochul directed the state police to work with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force ‘to monitor all points of entry to New York’.
The identities of the victims were not immediately released. A source briefed on the investigation told The Associated Press that they were husband and wife.
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