Human torso found in suitcase in the East River near Manhattan

New York: A New York City ferry captain discovered a suitcase drifting in the East River on Wednesday that turned out to have a human torso inside, according to an internal police report.

The captain, who was aboard the vessel Susan B Anthony, saw the luggage floating in the water late Wednesday afternoon near Governors Island, a largely recreational area just off the southern tip of Manhattan, according to the report.

Unable to fish it out of the river, the captain called the Police Department's Harbor Unit for help, the report said. Officers from the unit pulled the suitcase from the water around 5:30 p.m. and, after seeing what was inside, brought it to Pier 16 on the East Side of Manhattan, about a quarter mile south of the Brooklyn Bridge, police said.

Authorities have not been able to identify the remains. A spokesperson for the city medical examiner said the office would perform an autopsy to determine the cause and manner of the person's death.

Reached Thursday, the ferry captain declined to comment.

The discovery of body parts in New York City's waters is uncommon but not unheard of. A human head was found in Jamaica Bay in Queens in May. Then, in August, other human remains began to wash up on the shore of Brooklyn Bridge Park, just steps from its early-20th-century carousel. Over the course of several weeks, officers found a human skull, leg fragments, vertebrae and two feet inside a pair of construction boots, according to another internal police report.

News reports of such discoveries date back more than a century. In 1900, the body of a longshoreman was found floating in the East River just below East Ninth Street in Manhattan, according to an Oct. 1 article published that year in The Evening World, a turn-of-the-century newspaper.

In another case, authorities in 1967 pulled a man's body from the Hudson River, according to a New York Daily News article from Aug. 19 of that year. Police later identified the man as 62-year-old Joseph Robert Juliano, who had Mafia ties.