Posted on 09/12/2001 9:39:25 AM PDT by t-shirt
Just Came over the Radio ABC News Wire on WBAL Radio Baltimore. ABC NEWS REPORTS 12 Plane Hi-Jackers/Suspects Identified (Dead) & Arrest Warrants Issued For Others. Post details here.
A jet airliner is lined up on one of the World Trade Center towers in New York Tuesday.
Suspects smuggle knife-like weapons on planes
Ed Hayward, Tom Farmer and Cosmo Macero Jr. Boston Herald
BOSTON, Sept 12 — Authorities in Massachusetts identified at least five Arab men as suspects in yesterday’s terror attacks launched from Logan International Airport, seizing in the central parking garage a car laden with Arabic-language flight training manuals, sources said last night.
Major air disasters involving 767s
May 26, 1991
A Lauda Air flight went down in Thailand, after one of its engine thrust reversers accidentally deployed during a climb. All 10 crew and 213 passengers were killed. Nov. 23, 1996
An Ethiopian Airlines 767-200ER crashed near Moroni, Comoros while attempting to land after being hijacked. The aircraft had been on a flight from Ethiopia to Kenya. Ten of the 12 crew members and 117 of the 160 passengers were killed. The three hijackers apparently died.
Oct. 31, 1999
An EgyptAir plane with 214 people on board crashed at sea off the island of Nantucket early Sunday on a flight from New York to Egypt.
TWO OF THE men, whose passports were traced to the United Arab Emirates, were brothers, one of whom was a trained pilot, a source told the Herald, speaking on condition of anonymity.
At least two other suspects flew to Logan yesterday from Portland, Maine, where authorities believe they had traveled after crossing over from Canada recently. Once in the air, the hijackers in one plane began killing flight attendants in order to lure a pilot from the cockpit and seize the plane, said one source.
“They started killing stewardesses in the back of the plane as a diversion. The pilot came back to help and that is how they got into the cockpit,” said the source. The source could not specify whether those events took place on the American Airlines flight that left Logan, or the United Airlines flight. Both planes were plunged into the World Trade Center roughly an hour after they departed Boston.
The suspects had no guns, but used shaving kits and other carry-on luggage to smuggle knife-like weapons made up of plastic handles embedded with razor blades, sources familiar with last night’s developments said. That finding is consistent with reports of a flight attendant’s cell-phone call from one of the doomed airliners.
“People were calling from the plane saying they were getting killed, calling 911,” said one source. “One stewardess called her husband to say goodbye.”
Authorities were led to the rental car by a civilian who got into an altercation with several Arab men as they were parking their car, identified by sources as a Mitsubishi sedan.
The man, whose name was not available last night, called state police from an out-of-state airport after his own flight landed yesterday and he learned planes hijacked from Logan had been involved in attacks that toppled the World Trade Center’s twin towers, crippled the Pentagon and downed another airliner in Pennsylvania.
The car, rented from National Rental Car, was secured yesterday by the FBI and authorities have prepared a search warrant. It was unclear when the warrant would be served.
State police interviewed more than 130 people at the airport yesterday, as America launched what is expected to be the largest criminal investigation in its history.
Investigators suspect the two brothers identified by Bay State investigators were aboard United Airlines Flight 175.
The terror plot included the hijacking and crashing of four airliners, including one into the Pentagon, where the Arlington, Va., fire chief estimated the death toll at up to 800.
In New York last night, Mayor Rudolph Guiliani told reporters some people are alive in the rubble of the trade center complex, and there was an unconfirmed report of a cop being pulled out alive last night. There was also a report that survivors trapped in the collapsed buildings were making cell-phone calls.
A horrified nation witnessed the shocking carnage as the World Trade Center’s “North Tower” burned and exploded after it was struck just before 9 a.m. by Los Angeles-bound American Airlines Flight 11, which departed Boston’s Logan Airport at 7:59 a.m. with 81 passengers, two pilots and nine flight attendants.
A second jet — United Airlines Flight 175, that left Logan for L.A. at 8:14 a.m. carrying 56 passengers, seven attendants and two pilots — was captured on video as it sliced through the “South Tower” and unleashed a massive fireball just after 9 a.m.
Just moments before the first crash, air traffic controllers heard the lone voice of the terror plot speaking from the cockpit of one doomed aircraft.
“We have more planes, we have other planes,” a voice alleged to be that of a hijacker could be heard saying through a microphone activated by a pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, the Christian Science Monitor reported on its Web site.
Establishing the death toll could take weeks. The four airliners alone carried 266 people, none known to survive. At the Pentagon, as many as 800 people could be dead, including plane victims.
Roughly 50,000 people worked at the World Trade Center and there was an hour available for evacuations. But the toll already appeared staggering for the men and women who worked to save lives. A firefighters union official said an estimated 200 firefighters had died. An estimated 87 police officers were missing.
Within two hours of the initial Trade Center crash, the fiery nightmare gave way to mind-numbing grief, as both towers imploded, raining thick dust, glass shards, metal chunks and human remains on the streets below. As the twin symbols of American capitalism’s global reach crashed to the ground in a smoking heap of dust and debris, the Pentagon burned after another fiery strike — this time American Airlines Flight 77, which left Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., for Los Angeles with 58 passengers, four attendants and two pilots.
A fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93, carrying 38 passengers, two pilots and five flight attendants out of Newark, N.J., crashed in Pennsylvania with its intended target believed to be the presidential retreat at Camp David.
Officials assembled a massive team of investigators as harrowing details of the hijackings began to emerge, culled from desperate cell-phone and radio calls made by passengers and crew:
“One of the pilots keyed their mike so the conversation between the pilot and the person in the cockpit could be heard,” an unnamed controller told the paper. “The person in the cockpit was speaking English. He was saying something like, ‘Don’t do anything foolish. You’re not going to get hurt.’ “
The Los Angeles-bound plane requested a flight path for John F. Kennedy Airport, but then its tracking transponder was shut off and it veered toward the Manhattan skyline.
A flight attendant aboard Flight 11 called superiors to report two flight attendants had been stabbed and hijackers had broken into the cockpit, ABC News reported. The attendant also relayed the seat number of one hijacker before the plane struck the Trade Center.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft confirmed knives were believed to have been used in the Flight 11 hijacking.
Aboard American Airlines Flight 93, just moments before it crashed into the Pentagon, Barbara Olson, wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, called her husband on a cell phone to tell him hijackers wielding knives and box cutters had herded passengers and crew into the back of the plane.
“She called her husband twice during the hijacking to tell him the plane had been hijacked, and they lost contact once and she called back,” reported CNN, where Barbara Olson worked as a commentator.
“She said to Ted, ‘What do I tell the pilot to do?’ CNN reported. “But there was nothing they could do, they were all kept in the back of the plane.”
In Pennsylvania, an emergency dispatcher received a cell-phone call at 9:58 a.m. from a man who said he was a passenger locked in a bathroom aboard United Flight 93, said dispatch supervisor Glenn Cramer in neighboring Westmoreland County. “We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!” Cramer quoted the man from a transcript of the call. The man told dispatchers the plane “was going down. He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane and we lost contact with him,” Cramer said.
Virginia Rep. James Moran said the intended target of the plane was apparently Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, 85 miles away from the crash site.
Altogether, the four planes carried 266 people. There was no word on any survivors.
By evening in Manhattan, huge clouds of smoke still billowed from the ruins, obscuring much of the skyline. A burning 47-story part of the World Trade Center complex collapsed just before nightfall. The building had already been evacuated.
“The number of casualties will be more than most of us can bear,” Mayor Giuliani said. The scene at “ground zero” in the aftermath of the attack mirrored the grisly stories of both survival and death.
Some of the Trade Center’s 50,000 workers were seen leaping from windows to certain death, including a man and a woman holding hands. Some jumped from as high as the 80th floor as the buildings were crippled by flames, smoke and fire.
“People were screaming, falling and jumping out of the windows,” from high in the sky, said Jennifer Brickhouse, 34, of Union, N.J., who was going up the escalator into the World Trade Center.
While no terrorist group had claimed responsibility, investigators focused quickly on billionaire terrorist fugitive Osama bin Laden, already tied to the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing and the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
“No one has been ruled out, but our initial feeling is that this is the work of bin Laden,” said a high-ranking federal law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He is top of our list at this point.”
U.S. intelligence intercepted communications between bin Laden supporters discussing the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, according to Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“They have an intercept of some information that included people associated with bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit,” Hatch said in an interview with the Associated Press. He declined to be more specific.
Hatch also said law enforcement has data possibly linking one person on one of the four ill-fated flights to bin Laden’s organization.
In June, a U.S. judge had set today as the sentencing date for a bin Laden associate for his role in the bombing of the Tanzania embassy that killed 213 people. The sentencing had been set for the federal courthouse near the World Trade Center.
One former FBI terrorism specialist said yesterday that the hijackers who boarded the flights at Logan Airport may be part of a terrorist cell in Boston.
Robert Fitzpatrick, a former second-in-command in the FBI’s Boston office, said Boston appears to have been the staging area for the attack on New York and the hijackers most likely had help from others who may still be in Boston.
“There’s a terrorist cell operating out of Boston,” Fitzpatrick said. “They had to have support, they had to have people on the ground, in Boston, supporting them.”
Jessica Heslam, Jonathan Wells, Susan O’Neill and Herald wire services contributed to his report.
I got more stories as well I just found.
By DAN FREEDMAN, Washington bureau
First published: Wednesday, September 12, 2001
WASHINGTON -- Terrorism experts said the organization that masterminded terrorist attacks Tuesday was sophisticated enough to recruit trained airline pilots and put them on suicide flight paths -- a capability they said may point to Osama bin Laden.
A native of Saudi Arabia, bin Laden is in hiding in Afghanistan under the protection of the militant Islamic Taliban regime. He is believed to have been behind last year's bombing of the USS Cole, anchored off Yemen, and the 1998 explosions at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
He also has been linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six and wounded more than 1,000.
U.S. intelligence intercepted communications between bin Laden supporters discussing the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, according to Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"They have an intercept of some information that included people associated with bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit,'' Hatch said in an interview with The Associated Press. He declined to be more specific.
Hatch also said law enforcement has data possibly linking one person on one of the four ill-fated flights to bin Laden's organization.
Not only were the hijackings synchronized, but the attackers "picked aircraft that had the largest possible fuel loads to increase their explosive capacity,'' former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark said on CNN. "Clearly they had some ideas of symbols of American power that they wanted to strike.''
Just three weeks ago, bin Laden's followers had bragged of "huge and unprecedented attacks'' on American and Jewish interests in the near future.
Some experts cautioned against a rush to judgment that bin Laden was behind the attacks.
"I don't think we know yet,'' said Bruce Jentleson, foreign policy adviser to Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 campaign and director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. "But clearly this is not Timothy McVeigh with a Ryder truck and one helper.'' Jentleson was referring to the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168.
U.S. officials told reporters there were no warnings of Tuesday's attacks and there were no credible claims of responsibility.
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http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyKey=65607&category=F
September 12, 2001
The Citizen Online
By JUSTIN POPE
Associated Press Writer
BOSTON — Officials at Logan International Airport defended their own security measures after terrorists somehow boarded two nearly identical jets that took off moments apart, then crashed them into New York City’s World Trade Center.
"We have a very high security standard here," said Joseph Lawless, public safety director of the Massachusetts Port Authority. "We consider ourselves as secure, if not more secure, than any other airport in the United States."
Authorities said they received no unusual communications from American Flight 11, which left Boston at 7:59 a.m. Tuesday with 92 people aboard, or from United Flight 175, which departed 15 minutes later, with 65 people.
The 767s, both bound for Los Angeles, were apparently hijacked by terrorists and deliberately crashed.
"Everything seemed normal when they left Logan," Lawless said. "We don’t know how the hijackers accomplished what they did."
Authorities seized a car in the parking garage at the airport garage that contained Arabic-language flight training manuals, a source told the Boston Herald.
The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said five Arab men had been identified as suspects, including one who was a trained pilot.
At least two suspects flew to Logan on Tuesday from Portland, Maine, where authorities believe they had traveled after crossing over from Canada recently, the Herald reported.
The bags from one of the men did not make his connection. The Boston Globe reported Wednesday the bags contained a copy of the Koran, an instructional video on flying commercial airliners and a fuel consumption calculator.
WCVB-TV in Boston reported the car, a late-model Mitsubishi Mirage with Virginia plates, was taken to an FBI garage. Also six bags of evidence was taken from the airport to the Boston FBI office, including chairs in which officials believe the suspected terrorists may have sat while waiting to board the flight, WCVB reported while showing video of the bags of evidence in the FBI office lobby.
The FBI in Boston refused to comment, and state police referred calls to the FBI. The Massachusetts Port Authority did not immediately respond to calls.
The airport was evacuated and closed until further notice.
Members of the state’s Congressional delegation planned to meet with national security officials Wednesday.
"Clearly there were two failures of security at Logan Airport," said Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass, who stressed he did not think the security problem was isolated. "It’s not just Logan. If you have four hijackings in one day, you have a national problem."
Hijackers also crashed a plane out of Dulles International Airport into the Pentagon and another commercial flight from New Jersey crashed outside Pittsburgh.
FBI spokeswoman Sandra Carroll declined comment on the Newark investigation, as did Federal Aviation Administration officials on airport security at Reagan and Dulles.
"We’re not going to speculate or comment on security until we figure this out," FAA spokeswoman Arlene Salac.
In Boston, more than 150 state police detectives joined FBI and other federal investigators at the airport and had interviewed hundreds of employees.
Port authority officials said they planned security measures at least as stringent as those last implemented during the Persian Gulf War, including allowing only passengers past security checkpoints and eliminating curbside check-ins.
"One could speculate ... why we were chosen was because of our proximity to the New York area and the fact that we have wide-bodied aircraft leaving our airports fully loaded with fuel that participated in this tragic kamikaze-type attack on New York’s World Trade Center this morning," Port authority aviation director Thomas Kinton said.
Lawless said Globe Aviation Services Corp. of Irving, Texas, and Huntleigh USA Corp. of St. Louis operate security checkpoints for the two airlines at Logan. People at both companies’ headquarters refused to comment.
Logan had a history of security lapses.
In 1999, the major airlines at Logan and the port authority were fined a total of $178,000 for at least 136 security violations over the previous two years. In the majority of incidents, screeners hired by the airlines to staff checkpoints in terminals routinely failed to detect test items, such as pipe bombs and guns.
Also in 1999, a teen-ager who said he wanted to impress the Israeli intelligence agency allegedly sliced through a fence and settled into an empty seat on a British Airways jet and flew to London.
By Associated Press, 09/12/01
Worchestor Telegraph & Gazette
PORTLAND, Maine -- Two suspects in Tuesday's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center flew to Boston from the Portland International Jetport, Maine Gov. Angus King said Wednesday.
The two men apparently were using New Jersey driver licenses but little else was known about them, King said. They left behind a rental car that was impounded in the Portland area.
"This information appears to open up a series of leads that I'm sure will help to identify who the attackers," King told The Associated Press.
King said he was briefed at midnight by state police officials at the Maine Emergency Management Agency's 24-hour center at Camp Keyes, where the governor spent the night.
Jim Osterrieder, FBI chief in Maine, declined comment on the reports. He directed questions to the FBI's Boston office.
Authorities said they received no unusual communications from American Flight 11, which left Boston at 7:59 a.m. Tuesday with 92 people aboard, or from United Flight 175, which departed 15 minutes later, with 65 people.
The 767s, both bound for Los Angeles, were apparently hijacked by terrorists and deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center.
Portland Transportation Director Jeff Monroe said FBI agents were at the airport and reviewed surveillance tapes, but that airport officials had not been told that the suspects had flown through Portland.
Maine State Police assisted the FBI through the night, according to Stephen McCausland of the Maine Public Safety Department. McCausland would not elaborate but said he suspected more information would be made available later Wednesday.
The airport is responsible for security in the terminal and the field, but airlines are responsible for the screening of passengers and baggage, Monroe said.
US Airways offers a 6 a.m. flight between Portland and Logan, and American Eagle offers flights at 5:30 a.m. and 6:45 a.m.
The U.S. Border Patrol had no information that anyone connected with the terrorist attacks crossed the border into Maine.
Agents in Maine have not been in contact with the FBI, said Matt Zetts, assistant chief of the Border Patrol in Houlton.
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