Boston Cool in the Face of a Terrorism Tip

The mayor and other officials urged this city to carry on as usual Thursday while authorities tried to find possible suspects in an alleged bomb plot.

Unfazed -- at least superficially -- Bostonians did just that.

“I don’t know that we have any other choice, except to go about our business,” said James Norton, a 35-year-old bicycle messenger, as he strapped a cardboard box onto his 10-speed and set off onto snowy streets.

Photographs of two Chinese men and two Chinese women who are being sought for questioning appeared on the front pages of Boston’s two daily newspapers Thursday after federal law enforcement officials said they received a tip the day before about an unspecified threat against Boston. The FBI also said they were seeking two Iraqis in connection with the investigation.

Later Thursday, the FBI said it had added 10 more names to its list of people it wanted to question in the investigation -- nine are Chinese nationals; the nationality of the other was not released.

But authorities emphasized that the threat tip was uncorroborated and from what Gov. Mitt Romney termed “a very questionable source.”

Michael J. Sullivan, the U.S. attorney here, said Thursday that officials were not certain where those being sought were. “We can’t even say for certain that they are in the country,” he said. “And there is no evidence at this point in time that they have committed any crime.”

Sullivan said that the four people from China whose pictures were published Thursday -- identified as Zengrong Lin, Wen Quin Zheng, Xiuhin Chen and Guozhi Lin -- had never been categorized as “persons of interest” and had not appeared on any agency’s official watch list. He said they did not have criminal records in this country.

Sullivan would not comment on reports that the suspects had a crude radioactive bomb -- or the makings of such a bomb -- in their possession.

“This is where it gets spun out of control, where people start speculating about things like ‘dirty bombs,’ ” he said.

At FBI headquarters in Boston, spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz said the city was maintaining the same yellow -- or “elevated” -- attack risk level that had been in force for months.

Marcinkiewicz said: “There is no real, immediate threat to the community. We get this type of information all the time. We need to investigate to see if there is any merit.”

Romney was equally reassuring, explaining that he rushed home from Washington when the threat first surfaced because “I wanted to make it very clear that I feel entirely safe sleeping in my own bed in Boston.”

The governor said “it would have been fun” to have stayed in Washington for President Bush’s second inauguration, “but this is the place I need to be when events like this are discussed.”

At City Hall, Mayor Thomas M. Menino said he learned of the threat at 8 a.m. on Wednesday while attending a meeting in Washington, and immediately returned to Boston. Menino said he talked to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, and found “there were a lot of reasons why this [report] rose above” other information of a similar nature.

Still, the mayor said, “It took on a life of its own. There were all kinds of rumors yesterday that different things were going to happen. We fleshed them all out. They were all rumors.”

Nearby at Faneuil Hall, two visitors from Israel were playing cards. Yoav Shahal, 24, and Elda Cohen, 22, said they had not noticed swarms of police cruisers crawling around Boston.

“Does this not happen a lot over here, bomb threats?” asked Shahal. “For us, it is a regular thing, every day.”

“So I guess we don’t feel too scared,” Cohen said.

On Beacon Hill, directly across from the Massachusetts Statehouse, tour guide Brian McGrail said business Thursday on his Discover Boston bus was slow. “But not because of the terrorist threat -- I don’t think Boston really falls for all that hype,” said McGrail, 32. “It’s because of the frigid weather. This is the first really cold week we’ve had.”