New York cops probe massacre threats on Twitter

Aug 08, 2012 |

New York

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New York police has said they want to force Twitter to reveal who posted Tweets threatening to massacre theatergoers in a copycat of the recent bloodbath at a cinema in Colorado.

"I might just shoot up this theater in New York," one Tweet said. "I'm serious, people are gonna die like Aurora," another said, while a third threatened "mass murder for real."

After last month's massacre at the latest Batman film in Aurora, Colorado, which killed 12 and wounded 58, and the shooting of six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on Sunday, police in New York are on heightened alert.

New York Police Department chief spokesman Paul Browne said yesterday the Tweets, picked up by investigators at the end of last week, came to attention because they specifically mention the Longacre Theater in Manhattan. Former boxing champion Mike Tyson is currently performing his one man show at the venue.

"You have two mass shootings now in short order," Browne said on WCBS 880 radio. "We have someone threatening a similar attack in New York: we want to know who that person is." Browne said that Twitter was declining to give police access to the account in question and that the NYPD was seeking a court order to force Twitter to comply.

"We're getting a subpoena to order Twitter to produce that name," he said in the radio interview.

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