By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) -Federal investigators are probing whether the employee who reported a package explosion this week at Boston’s Northeastern University might have staged the incident, a law enforcement official told Reuters on Wednesday.
Boston police said on Tuesday that a package delivered to the urban campus had exploded while being handled by the 45-year-old employee, who they said suffered hand injuries requiring hospital treatment. The employee has not been named.
Northeastern cancelled some classes following the Tuesday incident. Other Boston-area campuses, including Harvard University, urged students to be cautious, stirring emotions in a city still scarred by the deadly 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
The Boston Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment the law enforcement official’s comments, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Suffolk County district attorney’s office, which on Tuesday said it was ready to work with law enforcement on any prosecutions, said federal investigators were taking the lead on the case. It said no one had been federally charged.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
ABC News, citing unnamed law enforcement sources, said authorities have found no evidence of a detonation and are questioning whether the incident actually took place.
Also citing unnamed law enforcement sources, CNN reported earlier on Wednesday the package contained a note criticizing Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook-owner Meta Platforms.
The note also deplored the relationship between virtual reality developers and academia, CNN reported. Boston’s WCVB news reported the note was packed into a pressurized container that exploded when it was opened.
Meta did not provide comment on the reports, nor did the Boston Police Department.
The city was rocked by the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013, when three people were killed and more than 260 others wounded by a pair of homemade bombs at the annual race.
A jury in 2015 sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for carrying out the attacks with his older brother, who died several days after the bombing in a gunfight with police.
(Aditional reporting by Rami Ayyub; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Josie Kao)
