NEW YORK,  – A man was arrested Wednesday night after entering St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York carrying two cans of gasoline, lighter fluid and butane lighters, police said, just days after a fire badly damaged the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

New York Police Department (NYPD) deputy commissioner John Miller said the arrested man claimed he was taking a shortcut through the cathedral after his car ran out of fuel, but his answers were “inconsistent and evasive.”

“We don’t know what his mindset was, what his motive was,” Miller told a press conference on the steps of the cathedral, a neo-Gothic structure in the heart of Manhattan.