Official: NYC suspect did a dry run

NEW YORK (AP) - A day before driving an SUV with a rigged homemade bomb into Times Square, a Pakistani-American made a test drive into the heart of the city, dropped off a getaway car blocks from his target and took a train home to Connecticut, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

The official's account of Faisal Shahzad, who took no visitors in the shabby apartment where he hoarded a gun and low-grade fireworks for months, bolsters a growing theory that he prepared a terrorist attack in the United States on his own once he moved back to the U.S. from five months in his native Pakistan, law enforcement officials say.

But while no other suspects have been identified in the U.S., federal authorities are seriously investigating whether foreign groups in Pakistan or elsewhere financed the 30-year-old ex-budget analyst's failed terrorist plot against New York, two law enforcement officials have told the AP.

One of the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation, has said one funding source under investigation is the Pakistani Taliban, which claimed responsibility for Saturday's botched bombing.

A spokesman for the Pakistan Taliban said it had no connection to Shahzad. But "he did a brave job," Taliban spokesman Azam Tariz said.