NYPD: Rifles on Staten Island apparently paintball guns

Michael Winter | USA TODAY

New York City police said the military-style rifles several people were photographed holding Friday morning on Staten Island were apparently just paintball guns.

The security alert came a day after Kuwaiti-born Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez killed four U.S. Marines in Tennessee and hours before President Obama was scheduled to arrive in New York for a fundraiser.

A retired city police officer took the photographs in the Midland Beach parking lot showing at least four people -- one apparently wearing a Muslim hijab -- transferring guns between two minivans with New Jersey license plates, according to a leaked internal "safety alert" issued by the NYPD intelligence unit. The officer indicated that one rifle may have been a paintball gun.

Friday evening, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism, John Miller, said interviews by the NYPD and FBI determined that the registered owner of one vehicle "indicated he was planning to go paintball shooting with friends today." He added that the investigating was continuing.

Soon after the alert was circulated, heavily armed officers and bomb-sniffing dogs responded to the Gateway National Recreational Area in Fort Wadsworth, near the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Checkpoints were set up on major highways and bridges leaving the island were reduced to one lane, snarling the Friday afternoon commute.

Lockdowns at the Coast Guard station at Fort Wadsworth and and Fort Hancock in New Jersey were lifted Friday afternoon.

Police were trying to determine whether the group was linked to several paintball attacks over the past 10 days in the Westerleigh section of Staten Island. An Orthodox Jewish man was among at least seven people hit by paintballs while out walking.

The Jewish news site JPUpdates, citing an unidentified police official, reported Friday evening that the vehicles were traced to an unidentified paintball company and that "the understanding" is that group "is most likely responsible" for the paintball shootings.