Officials: Times Square Bomb Could Have Killed

Investigators detonated a working replica of the car bomb used in the failed Times Square terror attack, creating a large explosion that destroyed other vehicles and scattered flaming debris, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

Law enforcement officials told CBS News that investigators from the FBI laboratory detonated a replica of the car bomb used in the failed Times Square terrorist attack to determine what damage the failed device would have caused had it actually blown up.

The law enforcement sources said the recreation indicated that the components - including three barbecue grill-size propane tanks, assorted fireworks, nails and tacks - if rigged properly would have severely damaged the SUV carrying the device and the flying flaming debris would have damaged nearby vehicles and property and likely caused injury and possible death to innocent bystanders.

The test was conducted last June in an isolated area in Pennsylvania under the supervisor of the New York FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Complete Coverage: Terrorism in the U.S.

The failed bomb was in a car abandoned by Faisal Shahzad in Times Square on May 1.

"It would have been extremely deadly," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Tuesday when asked about the test after an event at a Washington think tank.

Kelly didn't go into specifics about the FBI test. Two other officials told The Associated Press a video of test was played for a gathering of authorities earlier this week.

The officials spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the test. The FBI's New York office declined to comment.

The test was first reported Tuesday in the New York Post, which quoted an unnamed source saying that the results suggested the bomb could have been more deadly than the 1995 Oklahoma City car bombing that killed 168 people.

One of the officials who spoke to the AP said that was an exaggeration, because the Oklahoma City bomb - also made of fertilizer - was roughly 10 times larger than the one left in Times Square.

Calling himself a "Muslim soldier," Shahzad pleaded guilty June 21. During his plea hearing, the 30-year-old traced his plot to a 2009 trip to Pakistan, where he said he received explosives training and funding from the Pakistani Taliban for his one-man scheme.

He returned to the United States and loaded a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder with a fertilizer-fueled bomb packed in a gun cabinet, a set of propane tanks and gas canisters rigged with fireworks that he hoped would cause a chain-reaction explosion.

After parking the vehicle on a street near Broadway theaters and hotels, Shahzad said he lit a fuse that he expected would detonate the bomb within five minutes as he walked away. Instead, authorities say the bomb malfunctioned, emitting smoke that attracted the attention of a street vendor, who notified police.

Federal agents arrested Shahzad two days later as he attempted to flee the country on a Dubai-bound jetliner.

New York Police Department bomb experts later determined Shahzad had used a type of fertilizer that wasn't volatile enough to explode.

For the test, the officials said the investigators also used a Pathfinder, but rigged it with the higher grade fertilizer and more sophisticated components.