Connecticut Man Climbs NY Times Building

CBC News
A man who scaled partway up the New York Times headquarters and unfurled an al-Qaeda banner was arrested Wednesday, marking the third such stunt at the building in just over a month.

Officers arrested the man around 5:20 a.m. local time, about four hours after he was first spotted making his way up the 52-storey skyscraper in the darkness of predawn.

The climber, identified as David Malone, made it to the 11th floor of the midtown Manhattan building, unfolding a banner with red fliers stuck to it that said “Bin Laden’s Plan,” before descending and being arrested, the Times reported.

Malone is the author of a book, Bin Laden’s Plan, that argues that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were part of a plot by al-Qaeda to provoke the U.S. into invading Iraq, according to a book summary at Amazon.com.

The Daily News reported it had received a call from a man identifying himself as the climber. He said he was a 29-year-old man from Connecticut who dropped out of college to study al-Qaeda, which the paper quoted him as saying was “the biggest threat to the nation’s security.”

Wednesday’s stunt was the latest in a string of climbing episodes involving the one-year-old Times building.

“The climbing episodes have at this point become something of an embarrassment for the Times,” the newspaper wrote in a story posted online Wednesday morning.

On June 5, two men were arrested after scaling the building hours apart for unrelated reasons. One was a French stuntman known for climbing tall buildings; the other wanted to draw attention to the problem of malaria, the newspaper said.