nothin Cops Bust Illegal Explosives Factory | New Haven Independent

Cops Bust Illegal Explosives Factory

WTNH

Police have been spending the day clearing out rooms full of illegal explosives discovered in a single-family ranch house on the east side of town.

Members of the department’s bomb squad, along with firefighters, state cops, FBI agents, and representatives from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection have been checking out and clearing out the house at 35 Westminster St., a one-story vinyl-sided house built in 1964 on a one-block road near the North Haven border.

Cops discovered the cache while responding to an unrelated call Wednesday at 5:30.

They arrested a man and a woman who rent the house and were involved in a domestic dispute. While there, the officers started looking at what they recognized to be commercial-grade fireworks. Not the kind of stuff that you light off in your backyard on the fourth of July,” said police spokesman Officer David Hartman. They looked around a little bit more. There were hundreds of pounds of black-powder fireworks. I’m talking big mortars, the kind a city would hire a company to light off for their celebrations.”

Only these folks don’t run a company staging fireworks displays for cities. The house was the site of an illegal explosives manufacturing operation, Hartman said.

Police applied overnight for a search warrant, which they obtained. They and the other law enforcement officers returned to the house Thursday morning and spent the day inspecting rooms and removing explosives.

No one else besides the arrested pair, who remain in custody, live in the building, according to Hartman.

This is crudely drawn up stuff. Every room of this house is just filled with just hundreds of pounds of black powder,” which was used by the Boston Marathon bomber, Hartman said.

At this point, police don’t have a motive to report for the operation. They haven’t yet made any arrests. Neighbors told Channel 8 that the home’s occupants were known for staging elaborate, loud fireworks displays.

On Friday, the New Haven Register published this story with the man’s version of what happened.

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