

The Brooklyn Bridge caper is nearly a week old, yet it's still a whodunit despite the New York Police Department invoking every digital age investigative technique in the book to crack what appears to be a low-tech prank that included kitchen cookware to pull off.

The hunt continued Monday.

Vandals performed a monster switcheroo of sorts last Tuesday and removed two giant American flags from atop the bridge's two locked 276-foot towers, replacing them with white flags. The bridge is one of the Big Apple's most heavily guarded landmarks. The culprits, who scaled cables in the wee hours of the night, did it all under the cover of darkness by employing tin cooking pans to blot out the lights while sparking terror fears in the process.

"There was some pre-operation preparation and it looked like it had been thought out in advance," John Miller, an NYPD deputy commissioner, told reporters at a news conference.

The NYPD isn't waiving the white flag, so to speak, and it's employing every digital-age investigative technique in the book. Among other things, the NYPD is analyzing DNA. The New York Daily News said it was unclear whether the DNA sample was lifted from a flag pole or one of the tin cooking pans that blotted out the lights. Video from the bridge shows that at about 3:30am Tuesday, the lights atop the Brooklyn tower briefly fell dark.

There's also surveillance video of as many as five individuals, one with a skateboard, that the authorities have eyed.

The cops investigated two Instagram nicknames from a post suspected of being connected to the prank, only to come up with nothing. And they've employed license plate readers to analyze vehicles that were on the bridge during the early morning flag heist.

If all of that wasn't enough, the cops have embarked on another surveillance tactic. The New York Daily News said that authorities are combing through data from two nearby mobile phone towers and examining calls made around the same time of the caper.

The cops aren't even sure what the prank signifies, but it led to another one that duped The New York Daily News and The Associated Press. "Bike Lobby" tweeted that it was responsible for the deed "to signal our complete surrender of the Brooklyn Bridge bicycle path to pedestrians." But it was a parody account poking mischief at bicycle opponents.

Bill Bratton, the NYPD commissioner, said flag-gate was "a matter of concern" and he is "not particularly happy about the event."

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