NEW YORK: Police investigating a terror attack that could have set off a deadly fireball in Times Square — a major tourist destination — focused on finding a man who was videotaped shedding his shirt near the SUV where the bomb was found.

Police on Sunday said the gasoline-and-propane bomb was crude but could have sprayed shrapnel and metal parts with enough force to kill pedestrians and knock out windows on one of America’s busiest streets, full of Broadway theaters and restaurants on a Saturday night.

The bomb “looks like it would have caused a significant fireball” had it fully detonated, police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

A large amount of fertilizer rigged with wires and fireworks was found with the bomb, but police said it was not the ammonium nitrate grade that can explode.

The surveillance video shows an unidentified white man apparently in his 40s slipping down an alley and taking off a shirt, revealing another underneath. In the same clip, he’s seen looking back in the direction of the smoking vehicle and furtively putting the first shirt in a bag, Kelly said.

The homemade bomb was made largely with ordinary items, including three barbecue grill-size propane tanks, two 5-gallon gasoline containers, store-bought fireworks and cheap alarm clocks attached to wires.

“Clearly it was the intent of whoever did this to cause mayhem, to create casualties,” Kelly said.

Authorities didn’t know how deadly the bomb could have been, how it failed or who was responsible.

Police had already identified the registered owner of the 1993 Nissan Pathfinder — which didn’t have an easily visible vehicle identification number and had license plates from another car — and were looking to interview him. Police also were searching more video, believed to be in the possession of a Pennsylvania tourist, of a person spotted near the car.

The bomb at Times Square, one of the flashiest and best-known places on Earth, was found at the height of dinner hour before theatergoers headed to Saturday night shows.

Timers were connected to a 16-ounce (450-gram) can filled with fireworks, which were apparently intended to set the gas cans and propane afire, Kelly said. The vehicle would have been “cut in half” by an explosion, and people nearby could have been sprayed by shrapnel and killed, he said.

Police had feared that another component — a metal rifle cabinet packed with a fertilizer-like substance and rigged with wires and more fireworks — could have made the device even more devastating. Test results late Sunday showed that it was indeed fertilizer — but the New York Police Department’s bomb experts believe it was not a type volatile enough to explode like the ammonium nitrate grade fertilizer used in previous terror attacks, said police spokesman Paul Browne.