(5)Suspects Caught Crashes on Camera (They Watched Crashes & Celebrated, Also Some Suspects Abro

Five men suspected of being involved in the attack on the World Trade Centre set up cameras to record the atrocity, it emerged today.

Five suspects allegedly involved in the atrocities are said to have set up cameras on the banks of the Hudson to record the crashes

The men set up cameras on the west bank of the Hudson River, trained them on the twin towers to capture the attacks and apparently congratulated each other when the crashes occurred, the New York Times reported.

The five were under investigation by police in Union City, New Jersey, but it was unclear if any of them were in custody today.

The allegation came as police in New Jersey told the New York Times the hijackers who left from Newark airport on the flight which crashed in Pennsylvania had received aid from associates in the area.

The paper reported law officials said the team was "aided by confederates in Newark who were responsible for logistical support, including money, rental cars, credit cards and lodging".

And it emerged that FBI investigators believe each team of hijackers acted independently from each other but under orders from a supreme commander.

The conclusion was reached after evidence from the flights' passenger lists, payphone records, evidence taken from the rental car seized in Boston and the frantic phone calls made from the hijacked planes.

It was the commander who selected the flights to be hijacked and orchestrated the attacks to occur at about the same time.

But the man has not been publicly identified by investigators, the New York Times reported. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

In an excerpt from TIME's forthcoming special issue, TIME's exclusive reporting on the terror in the sky and the plotting on the ground.

Only God knows what kind of heroic acts took place at 25,000 feet as passengers and crews contended with four teams of highly trained enemy terrorists. But it is clear that the hunt for the culprits began way up in the sky, by the doomed passengers and crews themselves, minutes before the attacks took place. The victims on board at least two of the four planes whispered the number and even some of the seat assignments of the terrorists along with their final goodbyes in their brief and haunting Tuesday morning cell phone calls. A flight attendant on board American Flight 11 called her airline's flight operations center in Dallas on a special airlink line and reported that passengers were being stabbed.

That gave investigators a head start Tuesday morning that something had gone terribly wrong, but there were plenty of other clues. Even before the smoke had cleared, it was obvious that the culprits knew their way around a Boeing cockpit — and all the security weaknesses in the U.S. civil aviation system. The enemy had chosen the quietest day of the week for the operation, when there would be fewer passengers to subdue; they had boarded westbound transcontinental flights — planes fully loaded with kerosene; armed with makeshift knives and retractable knives; they had gained access to the cockpits and herded everyone to the back of the plane. Once there, they turned off the aircraft's self-identifying beacons known as transponders, a move which renders the planes somewhat less visible to air traffic controllers. And each aircraft performed dramatic but carefully executed course corrections, including a stunning last maneuver by flight 77. The pilot of that plane came in low from the south of the Pentagon and pulled a 270-degree turn before slamming into the west wall of the building.

By Tuesday afternoon, the spooks were making progress. Eavesdroppers at the supersecret National Security Agency had picked up at least two electronic intercepts indicating the terrorists had ties to bin Laden. By nightfall, less than 12 hours after the attacks, US officials told TIME that their sense that he was involved had gotten closer to what one senior official said was 90 percent. The next morning, US officials told TIME they have evidence that each of the four terrorist teams had a certified pilot with them, some of whom had flown for Saudi Airlines. It’s not yet clear whether the pilots were trained in the US, or in Saudi Arabia or both. Intelligence officials believe each team had four to five persons. Some team members, it is thought by US intelligence, crossed the Canadian border to get into the U.S. TIME has learned that within the past few months, the FBI placed two men associated with an Islamic Jihad terror group on a border watch list, but through a screwup, the pair got into the U.S. anyway. The two men appear to have been on American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, TIME has learned. Boston appears to have been a central hub for the operation; U.S. intelligence believes a bin Laden cell in Florida was a support group helping with the aviation aspects of the attack.

Intelligence officials pouring over old reports believe they got their first inkling of planning for the attack last June, although at the time the intelligence was too vague to indicate the scale of the operation. In the summer U.S. embassies, particularly those in the Middle East, were put on heightened alert. The U.S. military in the region moved to a higher level of alert. The CIA was getting vague reports "of some kind of spectacular happenings" by terrorists, said a U.S. intelligence official, but the reports were vague as to timing. "A lot of this reporting we had in the summer that gained our attention and had us concerned, but wasn't specific, could have been tied to this," said U.S. intelligence officials.

Even had they known more, could officials ever have contemplated the scale of this thing? The blasts were so powerful that counter-terrorism teams have begun asking the airlines for fuel loads on the plane; aviation experts have been asked to calculate the explosive yield of each blast —in kiloton terms. The reason? Washington wants to see if the planes amounted to weapons of mass destruction. "What we want people to realize is they’ve crossed a line here," said a U.S. intelligence official. In fact, some senior administration officials are considering drafting a declaration of war, although the State Department is leery since nobody knows precisely who the war would be against.

"Anyone who says this is not an intelligence failure is blowing smoke. This is an intelligence failure and a security failure," said Lt. Gen. (ret.) William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the former head of US Army intelligence. "The security guys will blame it on the intelligence guys and the intelligence guys will tell us the great successes they had in the past."

They told the people they loved that they would die fighting. In a series of cellular telephone calls to their wives, two passengers aboard the plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field instead of possibly toppling a national landmark learned about the horror of the World Trade Center. From 35,000 feet, they relayed harrowing details about the hijacking in progress to the police. And they vowed to try to thwart the enemy, to prevent others from dying even if they could not save themselves. Lyzbeth Glick, 31, of Hewitt, N.J., said her husband, Jeremy, told her that three or four 6-foot-plus passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark bound for San Francisco planned to take a vote about how to proceed, and joked about taking on the hijackers with the butter knives from the in-flight breakfast. In a telephone interview last night, Ms. Glick said her husband told her "three Arab-looking men with red headbands," carrying a knife and talking about a bomb, took control of the aircraft.

"He was a man who would not let things happen," she said of her high school sweetheart and husband of five years, the father of a 12-week-old daughter, Emerson. "He was a hero for what he did, but he was a hero for me because he told me not to be sad and to take care of our daughter and he said whatever happened he would be O.K. with any choices I make.

"He said, `I love you, stay on the line,' but I couldn't," added Ms. Glick, 31, a teacher at Berkeley College. "I gave the phone to my dad. I don't want to know what happened."

Another passenger, Thomas E. Burnett Jr., an executive at a San Francisco-area medical device company, told his wife, Deena, that one passenger had already been stabbed to death but that a group was "getting ready to do something."

"I pleaded with him to please sit down and not draw attention to himself," Ms. Burnett, the mother of three young daughters, told a San Francisco television station. "And he said: `No, no. If they're going to run this into the ground we're going to have to do something.' And he hung up and he never called back."

The accounts revealed a spirit of defiance amid the desperation. Relatives and friends and a congressman who represents the area around the crash site in Pennsylvania hailed the fallen passengers as patriots.

"Apparently they made enough of a difference that the plane did not complete its mission," said Lyzbeth Glick's uncle, Tom Crowley, of Atlanta. In an e-mail message forwarded far and wide, Mr. Crowley urged: "May we remember Jeremy and the other brave souls as heroes, soldiers and Americans on United Flight 93 who so gallantly gave their lives to save many others."

Like others on the doomed plane, Mr. Glick, 31, and Mr. Burnett, 38, had not originally planned to be aboard the 8 a.m. flight. Mr. Glick, who worked for an Internet company called Vividence, was heading to the West Coast on business, and Mr. Burnett, chief operating officer for Thoratec Corporation, was returning home from a visit to the company's Edison, N.J., office.

Lauren Grandcolas of San Rafael, Calif., left an early-morning message on her husband's answering machine saying she would be home earlier than expected from her grandmother's funeral. Mark Bingham, 31, who ran a public relations firm, had felt too sick to fly on Monday, but was racing to make an afternoon meeting with a client in San Francisco.

The plane was airborne by 8:44 a.m., according to radar logs, and headed west, flying apparently without incident until it reached Cleveland about 50 minutes later. At 9:37, it turned south and headed back the way it came. Mr. Bingham, a 6-foot-5 former rugby player who this summer ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, called his mother, Alice Hoglan. "He said, `Three guys have taken over the plane and they say they have a bomb,' " said Ms. Hoglan, a United flight attendant.

CNN reported last night that it had obtained a partial transcript of cockpit chatter, and that a source who had listened to the air-traffic control tape said a man with an Arabic accent had said in broken English: "This is the captain speaking. Remain in your seat. There is a bomb on board. Stay quiet. We are meeting with their demands. We are returning to the airport."

Another passenger on the sparsely populated plane barricaded himself in the bathroom and dialed 911. Ms. Grandcolas tried to wake her husband, Jack, but got the answering machine. "We're having problems," she said, according to her neighbor, Dave Shapiro, who listened the message. "But I'm comfortable," she said, and then, after a pause, added, "for now."

Mr. Glick, a muscular 6-foot-4 water sportsman, and Mr. Burnett, a 6-1 former high school football player, called their wives over and over, from about 9:30 a.m. until the crash at about 10:10 a.m., chronicling what was happening, urging them to call the authorities, vowing to fight, saying goodbye.

"He sounded sad and scared, but calm at the same time," Ms. Glick said. "He said people weren't too panicked. They had moved everybody to the back of the plane. The three men were in the cockpit, but he didn't see the pilots and they made no contact with the passengers, so my feeling is they must have killed them."

In a radio interview with KCBS in San Francisco, Ms. Burnett said her husband of nine years called four times — first just reporting the hijacking, later asking her for information about the World Trade Center disaster, eventually suggesting the passengers were formulating a plan to respond.

"I could tell that he was alarmed and trying to piece together the puzzle, trying to figure out what was going on and what he could do about the situation," Ms. Burnett said. "He was not giving up. His adrenaline was going. And you could just tell that he had every intention of solving the problem and coming on home."

Ms. Glick said that at one point, she managed to create a conference call between her husband and 911 dispatchers. "Jeremy tracked the second-by-second details and relayed them to the police by phone," Mr. Crowley wrote in his e-mail account of the calls. "After several minutes describing the scene, Jeremy and several other passengers decided there was nothing to lose by rushing the hijackers."

At the crash site near Shanksville, Pa., a local politician and law enforcement officials said the wives' accounts made sense.

"I would conclude there was a struggle, and a heroic individual decided they were going to die anyway and, `Let's bring the plane down here,' " said Representative John P. Murtha, a Democrat who represents the area and serves on the Defense Appropriations Committee.

An F.B.I. official said of Mr. Murtha's theory, "It's reasonable what he said, but how could you know?"

While the women cherished their final words and their husbands' seeming heroism, other people's relatives and friends struggled to reconstruct their last conversations with their lost loved ones.

Between sobs, Doris Gronlund recalled how her daughter, Linda, an environmental lawyer from Long Island who was headed for a vacation in wine country with her boyfriend, Joseph DeLuca, called on Monday to relay her flight numbers, just in case anything happened.

David Markmann last saw his upstairs neighbor, Honor Elizabeth Wainio, on Sunday night, standing on her balcony in Plainfield, N.J. Ms. Wainio, 28, who was a regional manager of the Discovery Channel's retail stores.

When the Newark flight crashed, "things started clicking in my mind," Mr. Markmann said. He dialed Ms. Wainio's home number — no answer. The cell phone rang four times and went to voice mail. He called again, and again and again and again, 15 times or more, until 2 p.m. yesterday, when he saw the list of Flight 93's passengers on the United Airlines Web site.

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(5)Suspects Caught Crashes on Camera (They Watched Crashes & Celebrated, Also Some Suspects Abroad)

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Germany Detains Man, Probes Hamburg Link to Attack<> September 13, 2001 8:01 am EST

By Erik Kirschbaum

HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Germany has detained an airport worker in connection with Tuesday's U.S. terror attacks and three of the suicide hijackers may have belonged to a Hamburg-based extremist group, authorities said on Thursday.

Police declined to identify the detained man and did not say what his job had been or where he worked. He was in investigative custody because he was in an apartment that was used by several suspects, they said.

The Federal Prosecution Office said it was investigating an extremist Islamic group that had been active in Hamburg since the start of the year. One suspect with Arab links was known to them but had not been detained yet.

"These people were of Arabic background and lived in Hamburg and were Islamic fundamentalists and they formed a terrorist organization with the aim of launching spectacular attacks on institutions of the United States," said Kay Nehm, Germany's Federal Prosecutor.

"They are being investigated on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization, murder and launching an attack on air traffic," he said. "We suspect that at least since the start of this year these people lived in Hamburg."

Nehm said no evidence had been found yet connecting the suspects with Saudi-born exile Osama bin Laden, who several western intelligence agencies believe may be behind the attacks. He is said to have denied any involvement.

LEADS FOR THE U.S.

The developments should provide important leads to U.S. authorities trying to identify the mastermind behind the hijacking of two planes into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington on Tuesday.

U.S. agents served warrants on homes and searched businesses in southern Florida on Wednesday. The passenger lists of the four hijacked jets included the names of at least four Florida residents suspected of being supporters of Bin Laden.

The northern port city of Hamburg is home to about 80,000 Muslims of various nationalities. Security experts say Germany is regarded as a safe haven for Islamic extremist groups.

Authorities said three of the suspected hijackers who had been on the passenger lists were members of the Hamburg-based group. Two of them and a further suspect had studied electronics at the Technical University in the city's Harburg district.

A Hamburg state police chief, Gerhard Mueller, said: "We have in the search for a suspect of Moroccan origin searched an apartment in Hamburg and provisionally detained one person, a man."

ON THE PASSENGER LISTS

He said it was too soon to say if the detained man would remain in custody. Mueller said the man had been living in Germany legally.

Hamburg's interior minister, Olaf Scholz, said police had searched four apartments on Wednesday night and questioned a number of people in the city after getting leads from media reports and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Scholz said Mohammed Atta, 33, whose name had been cited in media reports as a suspect and who was on the passenger list of one of the hijacked planes used in the attack, had lived in Hamburg in one of the apartments that were searched.

He was registered as being from the United Arab Emirates, as was Marwan Yusef Mohammed Al-Shehhi, 23, who Scholz said was on one of the other attack planes.

Al-Shehhi had also lived in Germany, sometimes in the same apartment as Atta, Scholz said. He left Germany for the United States on May 2.

"It is evident that they avoided doing anything that would bring them to the attention of police or the immigration authorities," Scholz said. He said police had interviewed a number of people but made no arrests.

Scholz said police had checked eight apartments in the city and searched four.

"In one of the apartments, the people who were registered as living there were not found, but one woman was taken from the building to the police station as a witness."

Scholz said: "We have gathered a lot of information that will be very useful for the further investigation of the Federal Criminal Office but of course will also be of great significance for the FBI."

"Hopefully we have made a meaningful contribution to clearing up these dreadful attacks.

'Fifty' suspects in FBI investigation

BBC

Thursday, 13 September, 2001, 15:24 GMT 16:24 UK

German police raided a Hamburg flat on an FBI tip-off

The FBI says the identities of many of those involved in the terror attacks on America are known. It is thought there were three to six hijackers, armed with knives, on each of the four planes that hit targets including the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on Tuesday.

There have been unconfirmed reports that rescue teams have found the body of one of the terrorists involved in the attacks - and the body of an air stewardess with her hands tied behind her back.

About 7,000 FBI agents in biggest manhunt in US history Three to six hijackers thought to be on each of four planes The FBI says it has identified as many as 50 people involved in the suicide attacks and say some were trained as pilots in the US

About 7,000 agents involved in the biggest manhunt in American history are searching for as many as 50 others reported to have helped execute the plan.

German police, acting on an FBI tip-off, arrested a man on Thursday after a swoop on a Hamburg flat where two of the suspected terrorists are believed to have lived.

'Pilot' quizzed

The suspects, Mohamed Atta, 33, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, 23, were each on one of the two planes which smashed into the World Trade Center, said Hamburg security officials.

It is thought they were trained for their devastating mission at a flying school in Florida.

According to German records, both men are from the United Arab Emirates.

German prosecutors said they were investigating a Hamburg-based terrorist network formed "to attack the United States in a spectacular way through the destruction of symbolic buildings".

CNN reported that another suspect arrested in Florida is helping the FBI.

Adnan Bakhari, described as a Saudi pilot, was arrested on Wednesday, after police seized a rented car in Maine.

Mexico alert

Officials at Ciudad Juarez airport close to Mexico's border with the United States say that US authorities have asked them to look out for six people suspected of involvement.

Three of the six are said to hold Pakistani passports.

Airport security chief, Juan Carlos Martinez, said he believed that the US authorities had given similar information to other Mexican airports along the 2,000km border with the United States.

Law enforcement agents also searched homes and businesses in Florida in connection with the attacks, focusing on the Huffman Aviation School where two suspects may have received flight training.

In Boston, a car believed to belong to the hijackers was confiscated. Officials said it contained an Arabic-language flight manual.

Thailand search

Investigators also raided two Boston area hotels thought to have been used by the hijackers. In one room a link was found to a name on one of the flight passenger lists.

In Thailand, security police say they are on the lookout for 15 Arab men wanted by the CIA in connection with Tuesday's devastation.

Mr Mueller said the bureau had established command posts at the places of origin and destination of the flights, where the investigation was being assisted by:

4,000 special agents

3,000 support personnel

More than 400 laboratory personnel.

One group of hijackers is believed to have crossed from Canada and to have had ties to Mr Bin Laden.

The FBI is dealing with 700 leads from the public and has set up a website containing a form people can use to report any new information on the attacks.

US Attorney General John Ashcroft also said the government had "credible evidence" that both the White House and the presidential jet, Air Force One, had been targeted in the attacks.

Thursday, September 13, 2001

Search intensifies for victims, suspects

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

The New York Times

NEW YORK -- Rescuers on Wednesday combed mountains of rubble at what had been the World Trade Center in a grim search for survivors among the thousands presumed dead in its collapse.

Rescuers remove rubble to rescue survivors and recover victims Wednesday where the World Trade Center once stood. On the day after hijackers commandeered commercial jetliners and crashed them into two of the most visible symbols of America's financial and military might, President Bush condemned the attacks while investigators began piecing together leads and rescue workers continued their somber search through the ash-coated rubble.

Investigators meantime cast a worldwide net for those behind the hijackers who slammed jetliners into the twin towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Virginia in the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.

The first clues to the identity of those responsible pointed toward five suspects whose movements appear to have taken them to Boston, Canada and Florida, and suggested that the knife-wielding hijackers may have had Middle Eastern and Islamic connections.

Investigators said they believed that each of the commandeered planes had been hijacked by groups of three to six men armed with box cutters and plastic knives that would have been difficult for airport security officials to detect. There was no breakthrough in the case, however, and officials said the inquiry might take weeks or months.

There was no continuation of the terrorist assaults Wednesday, as many had feared, but there were further collapses at the Trade Center Plaza. A nation that had been aghast and mostly shut down on Tuesday tried to move back toward a semblance of life. Across the country, businesses, shopping malls, government offices and skyscrapers reopened. But except for a limited number of flights, commercial aviation remained at a standstill.

Federal aviation officials, who had hoped to reopen the skyways, said that most planes would remain grounded until new security measures could be put in place at the nation's airports. Only those flights that had been diverted on Tuesday -- about 2,000 planes in the air at the time of the attacks -- were allowed to continue to their destinations Wednesday.

But the vast majority of America's 35,000 to 40,000 daily flights remained on tarmacs, and there were reports that a growing number of travelers feared flying and were canceling reservations and taking ground transportation. Many highways and bus and train terminals were jammed.

The Federal Aviation Administration's new security measures at airports called for prohibiting knives of any size on planes, ending curbside check-ins and eliminating all cargo and mail from passenger jets. They also ordered greater scrutiny of planes between flights and unattended vehicles near terminals. The measures were expected to add to check-in and boarding times.

There were reports of price gouging on gasoline sales in Ohio, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Georgia, up to $5 a gallon in some places, but prices subsided as consumer groups and oil companies offered assurances that oil supplies would not be affected.

The nation's stock markets were not expected to reopen before Friday or perhaps Monday. The New York Stock Exchange, its shutdown already the longest since World War II, said it wanted to do nothing to interrupt the search and recovery operations under way a few blocks away.

With jittery financial markets around the world sagging in the wake of the attack, central banks moved Wednesday to restore calm and ease fears that the terrorist attack would lead to a global economic crisis or tip the fragile American economy into recession. The U.S. Federal Reserve injected $38.25 billion into the financial system by buying government bonds from investment houses. Typically it buys only a few billion dollars worth of bonds in a day.

The scenes of attack -- the Pentagon, with one of its five sides in ruins, and the trade center, whose twin towers and three other buildings had collapsed -- continued to smolder as firefighters and rescue teams hoping for miracles probed the debris in round-the-clock operations.

And New York City was far from normal, with financial markets, airports, schools and Broadway theaters closed, and hospitals and morgues braced for casualties in horrendous numbers. The United Nations was evacuated by a bomb threat. While commuter lines, subways and buses resumed near-normal schedules, and schools were to reopen today, Manhattan below 14th Street was a no-man's land, with transportation and most businesses halted. Police restricted access to streets south of Houston.

The toppled trade center resembled a nuclear-winter war zone.

The danger and drama of the search for victims was captured in the rescue of one woman shortly after noon from a pocket of rubble that had been a pedestrian walkway over the West Side Highway. Fire trucks lay buried in the rubble as well, Joe Lashendock, an iron worker and rescue team member, said.

''Firefighters came across a lady and a fireman,'' he said. ''The lady was alive. Firefighters went down in the hole. She requested water. They sent in a basket and a neck brace. We all made a chain. She was breathing. Her hand was moving. We said, 'We're going to get you out of here.' She just looked at us. It makes it all worthwhile for the one.''

Firefighters rest near a piece of the World Trade Center early Wednesday. On the day after hijackers commandeered commercial jetliners and crashed them into two of the most visible symbols of America's financial and military might, President Bush condemned the attacks while investigators began piecing together leads and rescue workers continued their somber search through the ash-coated rubble.

What at first seemed to be one firefighter turned out to be a group, all apparently dead. The rescuers were forced to leave the men buried, fearing a further collapse that would endanger more lives. And late Wednesday afternoon, a five-story pile of rubble -- a jagged spire of steel and concrete -- toppled in on itself. No one was hurt, but hundreds of rescue workers fled for cover.

As a stunned nation reeled with televised images of death and destruction, and an almost wartime fervor against a faceless enemy gripped many Americans, President Bush, who had placed American military forces on alert around the world, called the attack an ''act of war'' and vowed to hunt down and punish those responsible in a ''monumental struggle of good versus evil.''

On Capitol Hill, the House and Senate passed a joint resolution expressing unanimous support for the president and for government efforts to track down the perpetrators. It also spoke of a nation united in efforts to recover from the attack and to rebuild. But the new agenda in Washington was sure to include debate about the effectiveness of American intelligence and airport security in a nation that had been taken by surprise in a meticulously planned attack.

Around the world, America's allies and even many of its nominal foes voiced revulsion at the attack and condolences for families of the casualties. North Korea, Libya, Syria, Sudan and Iran -- all of which have been accused by the United States of abetting terrorism -- joined the condemnations.

The 19 nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in a powerful message of solidarity, unanimously invoked its collective defense clause for the first time in the organization's 52-year history, pledging to regard the attack on America as an attack on all the treaty nations, which would support any retaliation if the attackers are identified.

In a telephone interview from Gaza on Wednesday, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, voiced compassion for the attack victims and angrily rejected accounts that some Palestinians had rejoiced over the attack. Asked about television pictures of Palestinian celebrations, he insisted that ''it was less than 10 children in East Jerusalem, and we punished them.''

Other groups linked to attacks on Israelis -- including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- denied responsibility. But an Iraqi newspaper applauded the attack, calling it due punishment for America's ''crimes.''

No one took immediate responsibility for the attack, but speculation focused on Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile living in Afghanistan who is blamed for the 1998 attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa. Afghanistan's Taliban rulers voiced skepticism that bin Laden was involved and issued a plea to be spared from attack, pointing to Afghanistan's poverty and under-development.

Investigators said the initial clues pointed toward Boston, Canada and Florida. They said that five Arab men had been identified as suspects and that a rented car believed used by the suspects had been seized at Boston's Logan Airport, where the two hijacked jets that rammed the trade center towers had originated. The Boston Herald reported that the car contained flight training manuals.

In a pair of bags designated for American Airlines Flight 11, one of the hijacked jets, investigators found a copy of the Koran, a videotape on flying commercial jets and a fuel consumption calculator, The Boston Globe said. Federal investigators said that the suspects may have entered the United States from Canada. The Boston Herald quoted investigators as saying that two were brothers with passports from the United Arab Emirates and that one was a trained pilot.

Other investigators said that heavily armed teams of federal agents detained three men for questioning and searched a room at a Westin Hotel in Boston's Copley Plaza. The three, a law enforcement official said, were being held as material witnesses after using a credit card that was believed to have been used to buy some of the hijackers' tickets.

Federal agents were also looking into known bin Laden supporters in Florida. They served search warrants at four homes in Davie and an apartment in Coral Springs, near Fort Lauderdale, and searched businesses in Hollywood and a home in Sarasota County, on the Gulf Coast. It was unclear if anyone was arrested.

Charlie Voss, a former employee at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Fla., said that agents questioned him about two men who stayed with him while getting flight training last year. He said they told him a car found at Logan Airport had been registered to the two men, one he knew as Mohamed Atta and the other only as Marwan. He said the men took flight training on small planes at Venice Municipal Airport.

The number of people killed in the coordinated attacks by knife-wielding hijackers may not be known for days or weeks, but it was likely to be in the thousands. A total of 266 people died on four hijacked jets: three in crashes into the trade center towers and the Pentagon, and the fourth in a crash near Pittsburgh. Estimates of the dead at the Pentagon ranged from 100 to 800.

But most of the casualties were believed to be in the rubble of the trade center. Many of the 40,000 to 50,000 people who normally worked there had not yet arrived when the planes struck, and many managed to escape in the time between the crashes and the collapse of the towers.

In a Wednesday evening briefing, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said that five people had been found alive and extricated from the rubble. He also cited reports that cell phone calls had been received from victims caught in pockets of rubble, and said that no effort would be spared to find them.

The mayor said that 82 bodies had been recovered -- a fraction of those presumed dead -- and that 1,700 were known injured. Fire officials said that 350 firefighters were missing or dead, including whole companies of firefighters and each of the five elite rescue units that served the five boroughs, in the worst disaster in Fire Department history. Most were caught in the collapses after rushing in to rescue people.

Besides the lost firefighters, dozens of police officers and other emergency workers were missing. Giuliani said that Jeff Immelt, the chief executive officer of General Electric, had donated $10 million to a fund for the families of police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers killed in the collapse.

On the number of dead, Giuliani said: ''The best estimate we can make, relying on the Port Authority and just everybody else that has experience with this, is there will be a few thousand people left in each building.''

Asked if the World Trade Center would be rebuilt, the mayor said, ''There's no question we're going to rebuild. I can't say that we know the exact nature yet of how we're going to do that,'' but he added: ''The skyline will be made whole again.''

Gov. George E. Pataki said that search and rescue teams, firefighters and National Guard troops were being augmented by reinforcements from states and counties in region and from Puerto Rico. ''They're risking their lives to try to save their friends and their colleagues and the New Yorkers who are still trapped,'' he said.

Some companies that had offices in the trade center were trying to count their missing employees Wednesday. Marsh & McClennan, a money-management firm, said that about 700 employees who worked in one of the towers were still missing. Keefe Bruyette & Woods, a securities company that advises banks on mergers, said half of its 170 workers had not been accounted for. Cantor Fitzgerald, a major player in the government bond market, said 730 employees were missing from the 1,000-member trade center work force.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the trade center and had offices at the trade center, said that 200 members of its staff were missing, including 35 Port Authority police officers and commanders who were involved in the early rescue efforts. More than 150 Port Authority officers were part of the search and rescue operations.

The Port Authority, which operates many bridges and tunnels and the three major metropolitan airports, said the upper level of the George Washington Bridge and the Staten Island bridges were reopened in both directions, while the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels remained closed.

The airports remained in a virtual lockdown for most of the day, although they were ready Wednesday night to receive any of the diverted flights whose continuation had been authorized by federal authorities. Check-in counters were empty at the terminals.

''It's like a ghost town,'' Hugo Chavez, a ground crew member at La Guardia, said. ''All we need is the tumble weed blowing through.''

Public health experts and federal officials said that the large number of bodies buried in the trade center rubble posed no risk of an infectious disease epidemic in the city. But they noted that exposure to chemical or biological agents in the debris could pose a health risk to those exposed.

Lower Manhattan was a strange setting Wednesday. The site of the World Trade Center, 1,350-foot twin towers and two other buildings in the trade center complex, were gone, reduced to mountains of debris and skeletal steel that jutted crazily. Over it all hung a pall of brownish-gray haze that carried a coarse, sawdust-like powder, a combination of pulverized concrete, insulation, paper and ash; it settled like a blanket, inches thick, on everything. In the rubble, too, were body parts, tons of paper documents, clothing torn to rags.

In addition to the collapse of Towers 1 and 2, three other buildings in the trade center complex fell. Buildings 5 and 7 collapsed Tuesday night, along with one of two walkways over the West Side Highway. A second walkway fell late Wednesday.

The damage was spread over the neighborhood. A chunk of Tower 2 landed atop the Bankers Trust building and the nearby St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church on Liberty Street, demolishing the roofs. Other buildings bordering the trade center on Liberty Street to the south, Church Street to the east and West Street to the west sustained severe damage to facades.

One World Financial Center, the Merrill Lynch building, the East River Savings Bank and the Millennium Hotel all have shattered windows, but appear to be structurally sound and are not cloaked in rubble. Two historic churches -- St. Paul's Chapel and Trinity Church -- sustained no visible damage. Six World Trade Center, at the northeast corner, still stands. And a sculpture garden on the east edge of the complex is coated with debris, but on six flagpoles the banners of New York State and City continued to flutter.

Suspects linked to bin Laden

By Karen Gullo THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

September 13, 2001

Massive probe: Spots in Florida, East searched

WASHINGTON — Federal authorities have identified more than a dozen hijackers of Middle Eastern descent in Tuesday's bombings and gathered evidence linking them to Osama bin Laden and other terrorist networks, law enforcement officials said.

The massive investigation stretched from the Canadian border, where officials suspect some of the hijackers entered the country, to Florida, where some of the participants are believed to have learned how to fly commercial jetliners before the attacks. Locations in Massachusetts and Florida were searched for evidence.

The names of two men being sought by authorities emerged in Florida. There, the FBI interviewed a family that gave them temporary shelter a year ago.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told THE ASSOCIATED PRESS that multiple cells of terrorist groups participated and that hijackers had possible ties to countries that included Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The identities of more than a dozen of the men who hijacked four planes with knives and threats of bombs has been ascertained, the officials said. Several hijackers had pilot's licenses.

Trained in U.S.

At least one hijacker on each of the four planes was trained at a U.S. flight school, said Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker. The flight schools were in Florida and at least one other state. The hijackers used both cash and credit cards to purchase their plane tickets and hotel rooms.

Authorities detained at least a half dozen people in Massachusetts and Florida on unrelated local warrants and immigration charges and were questioning them about their possible ties to the hijackers. No charges related to the attacks had been filed.

Search warrants were executed in Florida, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Sealed warrants went out in several other states, officials said.

"We're attempting to recreate the travels of each of the hijackers on the planes — either the hijackers themselves or their associates," FBI Director Robert Mueller said.

For some of the suspected accomplices, "we have information as to involvement with individual terrorist groups," Mueller added. He declined to say which groups or whether they were connected to bin Laden.

Officials said authorities were gathering evidence that the terrorist cells may have had prior involvement in earlier plots against the United States, and may have been involved with bin Laden. That includes the USS Cole bombing in Yemen and the foiled attack on U.S. soil during the millennium celebrations.

"This could have been the result of several terrorist kingpins working together. We're investigating that possibility," one law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity told THE ASSOCIATED PRESS.

Sen. Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said the briefing he received Wednesday from law enforcement left him with the same impression.

"Most of it today points to bin Laden but the speculation at the end of the road is that he and his network were very much involved with Hezbollah, Fatah and other" terrorist organizations, Grassley said.

The senator said authorities told him all the hijackers were of Middle Eastern descent and that they had "a tremendous amount of ground support for each hijacker."

Seeking two cars

A Venice, Fla., man said FBI agents told him that two men who stayed in his home while training at a local flight school were involved in the attacks. Charlie Voss, a former employee at Huffman Aviation in Venice said the FBI told him one of the men was named Mohamed Atta. A student at Huffman Aviation identified the second man as Marwan Alshehhi.

The FBI in Miami issued a national bulletin for law enforcement agencies to look out for two cars. Records with the Florida Division of Motor Vehicles show that one of the vehicles the FBI was pursuing — a 1989 red Pontiac — was registered to Atta, who previously had a driver's license in Egypt.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said numerous promising leads were being followed up. "The Department of Justice has undertaken perhaps the most massive and intensive investigation ever conducted in this country," he said.

Ashcroft said authorities were conducting interviews and reviewing airline manifests, rental car records and pay phone records. He said between three and six hijackers, armed with knives and box cutters, seized control of the four commercial jets. Two hit New York's World Trade Center, a third smashed into the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania.

Some 4,000 special agents and 3,000 support personnel are assisting in the investigation, and 400 FBI laboratory specialists are at the crime scenes in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Evidence has been collected at the Pentagon and Pennsylvania site, but investigators have not yet been able to start work at the World Trade Center, where the search for survivors continued.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they were investigating whether one group of hijackers crossed the Canadian border at a checkpoint and made their way to Boston, where an American Airlines flight was hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center.

Bush: 'We will win this war'

September 13, 2001 Posted: 12:06 p.m. EDT (1606 GMT)

President Bush talks from the White House with New York Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

(CNN) -- In a conference call with New York Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Rudy Giuliani, President Bush said he would visit New York City Friday to view the devastation from Tuesday's terror attacks.

He told Pataki and Giuliani that America was enveloped in a "quiet anger" and said: "We will win this war." After his phone call, Bush and first lady Laura Bush visited some of the injured and the medical personnel at a Washington hospital.

The president's comments came as airports across the nation reopened and investigators pressed their manhunt for those involved in the hijacking and crashes of four commercial jets on Tuesday -- two that destroyed the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center and a third that slammed into the western wall of the Pentagon in Washington.

Latest developments

• Officials in southwestern Pennsylvania said they have identified and cordoned off a second debris site about 6 to 8 miles away from the crash site of United Flight 93, the fourth hijacked plane in Tuesday's terror attack. Cell phone calls from passengers aboard the plane indicated the hijackers may have had a bomb and also that they were planning to try to retake the plane from the terrorists.

• The Pentagon says that an estimated 190 people died in the Pentagon crash; the highest ranking officer was a three-star army general. The figure included the 64 passengers and crewmembers on the plane.

• Giuliani says that the number of missing in New York has now topped 4,760. The mayor said that 94 bodies have been recovered, 46 of them identified.

• Rescuers in New York are searching for a survivor who contacted authorities via cell phone early Thursday morning. The survivor is believed to be in the basement of the northern World Trade Center tower.

• One of two brothers who had been identified by federal authorities as possible hijackers involved in the terrorist attacks is alive and cooperating with the FBI, sources said. Federal sources initially had identified Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Bukhari as possible hijackers who had boarded one of the planes that originated in Boston. Bukhari's attorney, however, said that Adnan Bukhari was not involved and that Ameer Bukhari died in a small plane crash last year. The attorney said that the brothers' identification had been stolen.

• New York authorities fear the building at 1 Liberty Street and the Millennium Hotel could still collapse.

• Authorities shut down New York's Staten Island at 8 a.m. on Thursday to begin a "grid search" for a vehicle.

• Bomb-sniffing dogs were sweeping through the Pentagon Thursday morning as employees at the Washington D.C.-area facility returned to work. (

• German police said they had detained a male airport worker and have brought in a woman for questioning. (Full story)

• Sheriff's officers in Sebastian County, Arkansas, detained a man who was taken into custody after a massive search by federal agents for a vehicle that they found Wednesday. A jail employee told CNN the FBI told them not to comment for "national security reasons." A spokeswoman at FBI headquarters in Washington said, "We can't comment on that."

• Authorities believe they have found the wheel of one of the planes that crashed into a World Trade Center tower four blocks away from ground zero.

The car was charred in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

• Major League Baseball has postponed nearly 50 games. Four golf tournaments have been canceled. Some college football teams will play, some won't, and the NFL was to decide Thursday whether to cancel weekend play. (

• Network executives have started to comb through their fall fare, hoping to erase anything considered tasteless in light of Tuesday's tragedy, Variety reports.

• Diplomats and aid workers are evacuating Afghanistan, fearing reprisal from the United States.

• Mortuary personnel at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Thursday afternoon will start receiving bodies of victims killed in the terrorist attack on the Pentagon, officials tell CNN.

• St. Vincent Hospital and Medical Center, a trauma center in lower Manhattan, is trying to put together a Web site that lists names of patients injured in the terror attack at the World Trade Center. Officials there say they hope to have it up Thursday.

• Countries around the world are sharing the grief of the United States as it becomes clear that hundreds of their citizens were caught in the terrorist attacks in New York.

• Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, has promised full cooperation with the United States in its fight against terrorism.

Feds think they've identified some hijackers

September 13, 2001 Posted: 9:18 AM EDT (1318 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Federal investigators believe they know the names of the some of those involved in commandeering two airliners out of Boston Tuesday and steered them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, sources told CNN Wednesday.

The FBI is working on the assumption that there were between 12 ande 24 hijackers directly involved in the attacks, and that there may have been as many as 50 people involved in the planning and execution of the attacks.

Sources also said all the hijackers may not have known one another, to prevent them from giving away information if they were captured and interrogated.

Law enforcement sources said the hijackers may have gone into action, performing pre-assigned roles, on receiving a signal.

Plane tickets for seven people suspected of being the hijackers were purchased with one credit card, information federal investigators deem extremely critical evidence, sources told CNN.

The credit card apparently belonged to a material witness picked up in Boston, not one of the hijackers.

Two of the hijackers apparently came to the United States from Nova Scotia, Canada, crossing the border via a ferry to Bar Harbor, Maine, sources said.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Interpol are assisting U.S. law enforcement in retracing their steps in Canada.

Authorities believe three to five hijackers were on board each of the four planes that crashed Tuesday, sources said.

Two jets slammed into the towers of New York's World Trade Center, one hit the Pentagon, and the fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

Key rental car records

After an initial review of passenger manifests from the flights involved, investigators began looking at several people, including at least one with suspected links to bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile living in Afghanistan accused of masterminding the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

The four pilots suspected in Tuesday's attack were traced with the help of rental car records from cars left in Maine and Massachusetts.

Evidence found in a rental car left in Portland, Maine, led investigators to two houses in Vero Beach, Florida. One had been rented by two brothers from Saudi Arabia.

Inside the house was a photo of Adnan Bukhari and a pilot's certificate in his name. There was also a pilot's certificate in the name of his brother, Ameer Abbas Burkari. On Thursday, sources close to the investigation said Adnan Bukhari was helping police with their investigation. Ameer Bukhari is believed to have been killed in a light aircraft accident prior to Tuesday's attacks.

The landlord said Adnan Bukhari and another man who lived next door described themselves as Saudi pilots and lived with their wives and children.

Law enforcement sources believe the neighbor may have been one of the hijackers who piloted the plane commandeered from either Newark, New Jersey, or Washington's Dulles International Airport.

The landlord, Paul Stimeling, said the wife and the children of the next door neighbor of Adnan Bukhari moved out over the weekend. The Bukhari family, the landlord said, moved out at the end of August.

Investigators believe the Bukhari brothers died onboard the jetliners involved in the crashes. Law enforcement sources said the FBI is seeking to question the family members as material witnesses.

The two brothers rented a car, a silver-blue Nissan Altima, from an Alamo car rental at Boston's Logan Airport and drove to an airport in Portland, where they got on US Airways Flight 5930 at 6 a.m. Tuesday headed back to Boston, the sources said.

Investigators are analyzing videotapes at the car rental facility and at the Maine airport.

Law enforcement sources said investigators searched the Florida houses for documents pertaining to other students at Flight Safety International, a Vero Beach aviation school.

FBI investigators also obtained the records of student pilots from other flight training schools in the area, including Embry-Riddle University in Daytona Beach and Huffman Aviation International in Venice.

Information found in another rental car left in Boston's Logan Airport -- where two of the hijacked flights originated -- led investigators to two more men who were pilots: Mohammed Atta and Marwan Yousef Alshehhii.

The two men held passports from the United Arab Emirates. A Florida driver's license was issued to Atta on May 2, 2001, and he previously held an Egyptian driver's license.

Federal investigators said both men received training at Huffman Aviation International.

The Mitsubishi sedan sources said was rented by Atta, contained materials written in Arabic, including flight manuals, that law enforcement sources called "helpful" to the investigation.

An apartment linked to Atta was searched in Coral Springs, Florida. Investigators also said they are checking the phone records of each of the addresses searched. They are also attempting to obtain fingerprint and DNA samples, sources said.

Lookout alerts and talking witnesses

Police issued a lookout alert for two cars -- a 1989 two-door red Pontiac with the license plate D79-DDV or DVD and a four-door Oldsmobile with the license plate VEP-54N. A vehicle registration record obtained by CNN showed the Pontiac was registered to Atta.

Heavily armed police and FBI agents swarmed the Westin Hotel in the Copley Square area of Boston Wednesday. Sources said three people were taken into custody as material witnesses. Others were picked up in Florida.

The individuals have not been arrested and they have not been described as suspects, but authorities said they could provide "important material information" related to the attacks.

Said one source: "They are talking."

A source said two of them may have "immigration status problems." Law enforcement sources said a cell has been operating for more than a year in the Springfield and Worcester areas, west of Boston.

Other developments

In Hamburg, Germany, the BKA, the federal criminal agency, searched one apartment at the request of the FBI, a police spokesman said Wednesday.

He said agents found that one of the apartments has been empty since February and the resident of the other did not match the name given by the FBI, so the second apartment was not searched.

Agents are taking evidence samples from the apartments, the spokesman said.

In another development, law enforcement sources said the United States intercepted two phone calls after the Tuesday attacks between members of al Qaeda, the terrorist network sponsored by suspected terrorist bin Laden.

In those conversations, the individuals discussed hitting two targets, the sources said.

In still another development, sources told CNN that America Online turned over records of e-mails Wednesday for the accounts belonging to the suspected hijackers.

-- CNN Correspondents Mike Boettcher in Atlanta, Kelli Arena, Eileen O'Connor in Washington, Susan Candiotti in Florida and Boston Bureau Chief Bill Delaney contributed to this report.

U.S. skies reopen to air traffic

September 13, 2001 Posted: 1:09 PM EDT (1709 GMT)

Passengers trickled into New York's LaGuardia airport Thursday morning. Federal officials have allowed New York's airports to reopen on a "limited basis."

(CNN) -- United States airlines and airports were set to begin resuming operations Thursday after the nation’s airspace was reopened to commercial air traffic.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta allowed the reopening of most airports at 11 a.m. but cautioned that the system would start up gradually.

“A system as diverse and complex as ours cannot be brought up instantly, and so we will be reopening airports, and airlines will be resuming their flights, as they meet the new security measures that we are now imposing,” he said.

Those measures include a ban on all knives, the elimination of curbside and off-airport check-ins, the use of federal air marshals, and a prohibition of all but ticketed passengers beyond airport metal detectors. Passengers also will be required to go to ticket counters to check in.

“We experienced an unprecedented assault on our commercial aviation system and in times such as these we will use all available resources to ensure the safety of our travelers,” Mineta said.

Travelers were encouraged to contact airlines to determine when or whether their flights would operate on schedule and to prepare for delays at the airports.

“Anyone planning on flying today or not even today but henceforth should check with their airlines regarding the level of service and flights schedules and especially be able to allow plenty of time to deal with the heightened security precautions,” Mineta said.

Several airlines said they would offer only limited schedules Thursday.

United Airlines said it did not expect to begin operating any scheduled flights until 7 p.m. EDT Thursday. It said it already had completed two of its diverted international flights Thursday morning, and that it would continue completing flights diverted September 11 throughout the day.

Delta Air Lines said it would begin very limited operations at noon EDT Thursday, noting its first priority would be returning flights that were diverted Tuesday to Canada and elsewhere.

American Airlines said it expected to complete 153 flights that were diverted. At least one flight had already reached its destination, from Canada to Dallas, Texas.

Continental Airlines said it was suspending its regular schedule for Thursday, but will fly its diverted flights. Continental officials also said they may add at least one flight to accommodate their passengers.

Northwest Airlines said that regardless of airports' status, its flights would not resume until 6 p.m. Central time.

Earlier Thursday, all three New York airports -- LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark -- reopened on a limited basis, New York Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman said. He gave no indication how many flights would be allowed in and out of New York.

Washington, D.C., decided to keep Reagan Washington National Airport closed. Washington Metropolitan Airport Authority released a statement saying that facilities at Dulles are open, but the airlines will not be ticketing passengers.

Among many that opened was Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport, the world's busiest.

"We want to stress that things will move slowly," Benjamin DeCosta, Hartsfield's general manager, told CNN. "We have new security procedures in place and we want people to bring with them their confirmed reservations, tickets, and their patience."

All U.S. flights were grounded for the first time in history, after Tuesday's terrorist hijackings and plane crashes.

FBI Looks at bin Laden's Strong Ties to Boston

(Why Didn't They Look & Act Before?!!)

By DENISE LAVOIE

AP 9/12/01 9:13 PM

BOSTON (AP) -- Terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden has strong family ties and a group of supporters in Boston, where the two hijacked airliners that demolished the World Trade Center took off.

One of bin Laden's brothers set up scholarship funds at Harvard, while another relative owns six condominiums in an expensive complex in the Charlestown section of Boston. Two bin Laden associates once worked as Boston cab drivers, including one who was jailed in Jordan on charges of plotting to blow up a hotel full of Americans and Israelis.

Bin Laden's ties to Boston are now being closely scrutinized as authorities focus their investigation on terrorist cells with possible ties to him, said Robert Fitzpatrick, the former second-in-command at the FBI's Boston office.

"The activity of this group here is obviously significant," Fitzpatrick said Wednesday.

Investigators are interviewing drivers from Boston Cab Co., where two known associates of bin Laden once worked, to see if they had ties to baggage handlers, who in turn may have supplied weapons to the hijackers, Fitzpatrick said.

"They are going to look at the cab drivers again -- since they are predominantly Middle Eastern -- and they are going to look at a possible link between them and the baggage handlers," Fitzpatrick said, based on his information from law enforcement colleagues.

"They could thwart the security by having a baggage handler put the material aboard the plane. That link is being investigated."

Last year, the FBI investigated the Boston activities of the two cab drivers, Bassam A. Kanj, a Lebanese native, and Raed M. Hijazi, a Palestinian. The men were tied by investigators to separate military and terrorist plots allegedly financed by bin Laden.

Both men lived for years in Boston and Everett, a suburb north of Boston.

Kanj, 35, was killed in Lebanon last year in an attack against the Lebanese army. Hijazi was charged in Jordan with plotting a New Year's Day 2000 hotel bombing.

Bin Laden, a rich Saudi exile who is believed to be living in Afghanistan, also has had family members living in the Boston area for the past decade.

In 1994, one of his brothers, Sheik Bakr Mohammed bin Laden, made a large donation to Harvard Law School to fund visiting scholars to do research in Islamic legal studies.

Harvard Law spokesman Michael Armini would not disclose the amount of the gift, but typically it takes about $1 million to establish a research fellowship. The sheik established a second scholarship at the Harvard School of Design.

Harvard officials were quick to distance the school from Osama bin Laden, emphasizing that he has no role in the scholarship programs.

"This is in no way connected to Osama bin Laden, who has been ostracized from his family and from Saudi Arabia," Armini said. "The purpose of this gift was to foster mutual understanding between the western and Islamic legal worlds."

Stephen Walt, a professor of international politics at the JFK School of Government at Harvard, likened the relationship of the bin Laden brothers to that of University of Massachusetts President William Bulger and his brother, reputed mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, who is among the FBI's 10 Most Wanted.

"I think that bin Laden is responsible for his action, but his brother is not responsible for Osama's actions, and vice versa," Walt said.

Another relative, Mohammed M. bin Laden, owns six condominiums in the ritzy Flagship Wharf condominium complex in Charlestown. His relation to bin Laden could not immediately be determined. A woman who answered the telephone at the management company for the complex refused to answer questions.

The condos were bought in the mid-1990s and range in assessed value from $296,000 to $877,000, The Boston Globe reported.

Juliette Kayyem, a former member of the National Commission on Terrorism, said Boston has several factors that may have attracted bin Laden's supporters.

"Our proximity to the Canadian border and Boston being a big city where people can hide is likely why Boston became the center," Kayyem said. "Also being on the Eastern Seaboard, we have wide-bodied jets with large fuel tanks. When you don't have other weapons, that's your weapon."

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? This is an amazing story!

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