Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Mueller says no arrests have been made; passengers tried to stop hijackers aboard the fourth plane which may have been headed for another target in the Washington area.
Sep 12, 2001 | FBI Director Robert Mueller says the agency has identified most of the hijackers responsible for Tuesday's devastating terrorist attacks and many of their associates, but that no arrests have been made. The attacks leveled New York's World Trade Center towers and damaged the Pentagon. Thousands are feared dead.
"We have in the last 24 hours taken the [flight] manifests and used them as an evidentiary base," Mueller told a press conference Wednesday afternoon, "and have talked to many of the families of the victims, and have successfully, I believe, identified many of the hijackers on each of the four flights."
"We also have identified through a number of leads, principally at the cities of origin, a number of individuals who we believe may have had something to do with the hijackings, and we are pursuing those leads aggressively," Mueller continued.
Mueller denied reports that suspects arrested in Boston, and others taken into custody in Florida, were being held in connection with the case.
"There have been occasions where we have interviewed individuals and come to find that the individual is out of status," Mueller said, "and that individual has been detained on an immigration hold, but there has been no arrest relating to these hijackings at this point."
Mueller said the FBI was pursuing leads in Providence, R.I., as well as Boston and Florida.
At the same press conference, Attorney General John Ashcroft confirmed earlier reports that each of the four planes that crashed Tuesday was commandeered by a team of three to six hijackers using knives and box-cutters, and at times making bomb threats. Ashcroft said there is credible information that the White House and Air Force One were both targeted Tuesday.
Four planes were hijacked Tuesday. Two of them, both originating in Boston, crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, destroying those landmark towers. Another, which took off from Washington Dulles airport, slammed into the Pentagon near the nation's capital. A fourth plane, originating in Newark, N.J., crashed in rural Pennsylvania, apparently missing its target -- speculated by authorities to be either the presidential retreat in Maryland at Camp David, Edwards Air Force Base, the White House or the Capitol.
The presidential residence also may have been the target of another plane, perhaps United Flight 93, destined for San Francisco from Newark, N.J., which crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania. At a separate press conference, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "We have real and credible information that the plane that hit the Pentagon was intended to hit the White House." Fleischer said the threats to the White House and Air Force One were the reason President Bush flew to Louisiana and Nebraska before returning to Washington Tuesday. Bush began his day in Florida.
There is also indication that Flight 93 may have missed its target because passengers on board confronted the hijackers. A number of passengers on board called relatives from the flight, and indicated that the male passengers on board were going to try to wrest control of the plane from the hijackers after the passengers heard of the attacks at the World Trade Center.
Two hundred sixty-six people died on the downed planes, and Mayor Guiliani said that he expected "thousands" to be found on the ground in the buildings. New York officials said that more than 250 firefighters and police officers were missing and feared dead. There were reports Wednesday afternoon that four or five firefighters had been located alive in the rubble, but hadn't been rescued yet.
As rescuers vainly attempted to reach any further survivors, damaged buildings surrounding the World Trade Center continued to collapse. The remaining portion of the southern tower disintegrated at 5:30 p.m. EDT, and the area was swiftly evacuated as the 54-story One Liberty Plaza -- home to the headquarters of the NASDAQ, just to the east of the World Trade Center -- also partially collapsed.
In the day and a half since the attack, government and law enforcement officials have said that early evidence points to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, a billionaire terrorist leader who was suspected of masterminding the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa and considers himself a declared enemy of the United States. But officials have refused to rule out other possibilities. Bin Laden is thought to be living Afghanistan under the protection of that country's fundamentalist Taliban rulers.
As what was expected to be the largest law enforcement investigation in American history swung into full gear Wednesday, police and the FBI took several people into custody in Boston and South Florida in connection with the terrorist attacks.
The Boston Globe reported that three people had been arrested after a fully-armed tactical squad of Boston police and FBI entered the Westin Hotel in Copley Square early Wednesday afternoon. Ambulances and bomb squad trucks stood by outside the hotel as a crowd gathered and TV networks beamed live pictures. There was a report that one of the suspects was injured. A stretcher was seen being carried into the hotel.
The Boston Herald reported in its Wednesday editions that authorities had seized a rental car in a Logan airport garage that contained Arabic-language flight training manuals. Passports of five suspects identified by Massachusetts authorities were traced to the United Arab Emirates, the Herald's source said. Two of the men were brothers, and one of the brothers was a trained pilot.
Authorities were led to the car, which was rented from National Car Rental, by a man who got into an altercation with several Arab men as they were parking their car, sources told the Herald. The man called state police after his flight landed in another state and he learned about the hijacking tragedy.
The paper quoted Robert Fitzpatrick, a former second-in-command in the FBI's Boston office, saying that Boston appears to have been the staging area for the attack on New York and that 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."
A flight manifest from one of the ill-fated flights included the name of a suspected bin Laden supporter. And U.S. intelligence intercepted communications between bin Laden supporters discussing Tuesday's attacks, Hatch told the Associated Press.
Also, a bomb squad searched the cargo hold of a Continental Airlines jet at Daytona International Airport. Fox News reported that some of the terrorists may have received flight training at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, but it was not known why the plane was being searched.
In Florida Wednesday, the FBI and Coral Gables police entered the home of a suspected hijacker, Mohammad Atta, and issued a "BOLO," or "be on the lookout," for two cars. The FBI confirms it has people in custody in Florida, but won't say whether anyone was taken out of the Coral Gables home. FBI officials have also been in contact with the Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice regarding one of the school's students.
A southwest Florida man said FBI agents investigating the terrorist attacks told him that two men who stayed with him while getting flight training last year were involved in Tuesday's attacks. Charlie Voss, a former employee at Huffman Aviation in Venice, said FBI agents who interviewed him at his home told him that a car found at Boston's Logan International Airport was registered to the two men. The car had Arabic-language flight training manuals inside. Voss said one of the men who stayed at the house in July 2000 was named Mohamed Atta. He said he knew the other man only by the name of Marwan.
In Hamburg, Germany, police searched an apartment at the request of the FBI, according to CNN. The apartment was empty, but a police spokesman said five people of "apparently Arab descent" had been using it until February.
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