Metro

PA cop allowed PATH train with potential bomb on board to go to WTC

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In a glaring security breach, a Port Authority police supervisor allowed a PATH train with a potential bomb aboard to travel from Jersey City to the World Trade Center, sources told The Post.

Incredibly, the same cop was reprimanded for doing the same thing a year ago, when he authorized a PATH train to continue without checking out another suspicious package, the outraged sources said.

In the latest incident, Lt. James O’Neill gave the train the green light Wednesday, despite pleas from subordinates that he wait for a K-9 officer who was on the way to check the suspicious package left under a seat.

“It was a clear dereliction of duty,” a police official said, charging that O’Neill needlessly imperiled the crew and could have endangered two prime terror targets — the Hudson PATH tunnel and the WTC site itself.

O’Neill, a 29-year veteran of the agency, could not be reached for a comment, and a PA spokesperson refused to discuss the matter.

The suspicious box was spotted at about 7:50 p.m. on a Red Line train at the Exchange Place station as the evening rush was dying down, sources said.

Patrol cops were notified and evacuated passengers, but crew members, including the engineer, brakeman, flagmen and conductors, remained on board.

PAPD K-9 Unit Officer Bryan Fitzpatrick and his bomb-sniffing German shepherd, Max, had been dispatched and were about five minutes away.

But O’Neill, working at Journal Square in Jersey City, about three miles west of Exchange Place, apparently wanted to keep things moving and “cleared the train” for departure. It soon left for the WTC station, which is about 15 minutes away, sources said.

O’Neill made the call “from his desk” — without showing up at the Exchange Place station to investigate, a source said.

Some of O’Neill’s subordinates at Journal Square angrily tried to convince him to hold the train, the sources said.

“There was an argument,” a source said.

When the train arrived at the WTC platform, K-9 cop Salvatore LoBrutto and his German shepherd, Rexo, determined the package was a remote-control toy helicopter inside a box.

The sources pointed out that the PATH tunnel has a history as a terror target.

In July 2006, the FBI said al Qaeda fiend Assem Hammoud had planned to recruit suicide bombers with backpacks to blow up the Hudson River tunnel in a bid to flood lower Manhattan.

After Wednesday’s incident, K-9 Officer Frank Conti wrote a letter to department brass reminding them they had chastised O’Neill after his first offense.

PAPD brass “did not want this to happen again, as it is not an acceptable course of action,” Conti wrote in the letter obtained by The Post.

Even before last year, O’Neill ran into trouble with department bosses.

He left his post at the Holland Tunnel to take his Corvette for a spin with a female officer and crashed on the New Jersey Turnpike in January 2008.

philip.messing@nypost.com