Cops evacuated the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood around the Remsen St. home of Michael Clatts, a medical anthropologist, after finding seven pipe bombs fitted with fuses in his flat, police sources said.
The frightening cache was discovered almost by accident - Ivaylo Ivanov, the man living with Clatts, accidentally shot off the tip of his left index finger and sought police help in the street about 1:15 a.m.
When investigators went to the 37-year-old Ivanov's apartment, they found the bombs, already capped on both ends and filled with powder. One of the pipe bombs was inserted into a Nerf football, cops said.
A 9-mm. handgun, two ammunition magazines, a 12-gauge shotgun, silencers, a bulletproof vest, a crossbow and bomb-making equipment, including a drill and threading machine that could be used to make pipe bombs, were also recovered, cops said.
Investigators with the NYPD-FBI were questioning Ivanov, a native of Bulgaria, to determine whether he had any terrorism or Russian Mafia connections, a source told the Daily News.
"Russian Mafia aren't fazed by getting a fingertip shot off - and they certainly don't go to the cops for help," the source said.
UPDATE: What is Clatt's connection to all this?
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers picked up the researcher, Michael Clatts, at John F. Kennedy International Airport yesterday morning as he was returning from Vietnam, where he had been conducting a research project for the National Institute on Drug Abuse....
Customs officers took Mr. Clatts to the Downtown Brooklyn precinct, where he refused to speak with detectives working on the case. Instead, he requested his lawyer be called and was later released....
Several neighbors in the building said they believed that Mr. Clatts would have been unaware of his roommate's alleged involvement in the crimes. Mr. Clatts travels often for his work, his neighbors have said, and he was not believed to be in the apartment this week when the arsenal was found.
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