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Friday,
September 14,
2001, Chandigarh, India  
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Hijackers had significant ground support: AG
Tapes handed over to FBI Boston The pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, secretly sent messages to controllers on the ground during much of the flight, the Christian Science Monitor reported in today editions. Taliban trained pilots 100 Britons died in attacks Indian runs
down 73 floors, escapes death 4 Lanka ministers quit over deal |
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Hijackers had significant ground support: AG Washington, September 13 “(To have) operated with technical proficiency to target and to land an aircraft of that size with the deadly accuracy of these acts of war, was something obviously that resulted from a complex organization with significant ground support,” Ashcroft said. In an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America programmes, he said there had to have been extensive ground support and coordination for the hijackers to conduct such acts, killing thousands of people. “We are not prepared to say how much ground support and how much coordination and whether or not there was a cellular breakdown and what that would be,” he said. In a separate interview with CNN, Ashcroft said investigators were making progress with tracking down those involved. “As soon as we have the capacity to bring to justice people who were associated with this as ground support for these operations we’re going to do that.” He also confirmed there was indications the hijackers planned to attack President George W. Bush and the presidential plane, Air Force One. Ashcroft declined to comment on an ABC news report that the hijackers were aware of Secret Service Codes and that a threat had been called in on Tuesday against Air Force One, which deviated from its original course soon after the attacks. “I do know that our nation understood and learned that there were credible threats against the White House and Air Force One. I am not in a position to discuss the nature of the evidence regarding those threats but they were credible threats and we take them seriously,” he said. Ashcroft said the Justice Department was pursuing thousands of credible leads to find the perpetrators of the attacks, the worst acts of terror on US soil. “It is a massive effort and it is one which is resulting in credible leads which we are following,” Mr Ashcroft said some of the hijackers who commandeered planes used in terror attacks on the World Trade center and the Pentagon were trained as pilots in the USA, US Attorney General John Ashcroft said today. “A number of the suspected hijackers were trained as pilots in the USA,” Ashcroft told a news conference at FBI headquarters . “Four planes were hijacked by three to six individuals per plane, using knives and box-cutters and in some cases making bomb threats,” Ashcroft said. At the same news conference, FBI Director Robert Mueller denied news reports that arrests had been made “at this point,” but he said a few people were being detained on questions about their immigration status or were being interviewed. Mueller, on his ninth day on the job as FBI Chief, said investigators had identified many of the hijackers in the four planes. “Our first effort is to identify any associates in the USA who might be related to the hijackers and to remove those associates, investigate and arrest, given the evidence, those individuals, and to remove any threat to the air system in the future,” he said. “The second objective is to gather any and all evidence we have as to who assisted the hijackers, not only in this country but also overseas,” said Mueller, head of the nation’s top law enforcement agency. Mueller said investigators had identified, through various leads, a number of individuals believed to have had something to do with the hijackings. “We are pursuing those leads aggressively,” he said. He said 4,000 special agents and 3,000 support workers — about one-quarter of those employed by the FBI — had been assigned to the investigation. More than 400 workers from the FBI crime laboratory have been sent to the sites where the planes crashed, he said.
Reuters |
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Pilot sent secret messages Boston The paper, citing interviews with two unnamed air traffic controllers, said the pilot was apparently triggering a “push to talk” switch in the cockpit, probably on the plane’s steering wheel, known as a yoke. “The button was being pushed intermittently most of the way to New York,” one of the controllers told the newspaper. “He wanted us to know something was wrong. When he pushed the button and the terrorist spoke, we knew. There was this voice that was threatening the pilot and it was clearly threatening.” During the transmissions, the pilot’s voice and the heavily accented voice of a hijacker were clearly audible, the controllers told the paper. The transmissions were all recorded. The paper said the tapes had been turned over to federal law enforcement officials. The paper said the controllers were first tipped off that something was wrong on Flight 11 when the aircraft failed to follow an instruction to climb to its cruising altitude of 31,000 feet (9,449 metres). “He was cleared to continue his climb and he did not,” the paper quoted one of the controllers as saying. “He was given permission to turn to go around (other airplane) traffic at 29,000 (feet/8,839 metres). So he (the controller) issued a further climb and (the plane) did not respond. That was the first indication we had of a problem,” the controller told the newspaper. The controller handling the plane then tried repeatedly to raise the aircraft on the radio but got no response. He then switched to an emergency frequency but again failed to establish contact. At about the same time, some 20 minutes into American Airlines Flight 11’s trip, the aircraft’s transponder stopped working, making its altitude a matter of guesswork. Without the transponder, the plane was still visible on radar. “Then the plane turned (south towards New York), and then they heard the transmission with the terrorist in the background,” the controller told the paper. “The voice upset him (the controller) because he knew right then that he was working on a hijack. Several other people heard the voice and they could tell by the sound of it, intuitively, that this was a bad situation,” the controller said. Washington: Dramatic transcripts and reports of hurried cell phone conversations suggest that Glick and a few other passengers aboard the doomed United Airlines Flight 93 may have struggled with hijackers who commandeered the airliner. In doing so, they may have thwarted an attempt to crash the airliner into a target in or near Washington. The plane crashed in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, at about 2.06 p.m. (GMT) on Tuesday, soon after another United jet and two American Airlines planes plowed into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington. Glick’s brother-in-law, Douglas Hurwitt, told The Washington Post that Glick called his wife Lyzbeth in New York on cell phone to tell her the plane had been hijacked. Joanne Makely, Glick’s mother-in-law, told CNN that Glick described how all passengers and possibly the crew had been herded to the back of the Boeing 757. The plane had left Newark bound for Los Angeles with 38 passengers and seven crew members. Glick said he could see three men he described as Arabs and that the plane was over countryside. “One of the hijackers had a red box he said was a bomb, and one had a knife of some nature,” Makely said. He also said passengers knew a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center just minutes before and said some of them were talking about retaking control of their plane. The CNN said it had obtained a partial transcript of cockpit communications in which someone could be heard shouting, “Get out of here,” through an open microphone. At this point the aircraft was flying at 10,700 metres near Cleveland. Scuffling could be heard as the microphone clicked on and off and CNN quoted a source who heard the tape as saying that a voice with an Arabic speaker’s accent could be heard. “There is a bomb on board,” the transcript reads.
Reuters |
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Taliban trained pilots Beirut, September 13 Quoting a former pilot at Afghanistan’s national airline Ariana, identified as “Capt Rassul Birwaz,” the paper said the Taliban had assigned him and four of his colleagues to train “14 young Islamists,” whom he described as being “fanatics,” to fly civil airliners. He said the trainees included “Arabs, Afghans, and Pakistanis who either themselves, or their relatives, fought in the ranks of the Taliban.” Seven spoke perfect English and translated the pilots’ manuals into languages spoken in Afghanistan during their training, he said. They received theoretical training and flight simulation on the ground before being taken to an airbase near Bamiyan, west of Kabul, to train on Boeings belonging to Ariana, the report said. “Their training in this base was performed by captain Abdel Sattar and captain Fayd, as well as by a retired Pakistani general, Islam Khan,” Rassoul added. The trainees, some of whom held European passports, left Afghanistan close to a year ago, he said.
AFP |
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100 Britons died in attacks London, September 13 “The number of confirmed British deaths have approached 100. The total number of British deaths is unlikely to be less than the middle hundreds — and may be higher,’’ Mr Straw said. Mr Straw told a press conference that British intelligence services would intensify cooperation with their U.S. counterparts to try to find the culprits of Tuesday’s kamikaze plane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “We do have extensive skilled intelligence services in this country but we do not live in a perfect world...that (British-U.S.) cooperation will continue but in an intensified way,” he said. Thousands of people are thought to have lost their lives in the attacks.
Reuters |
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Indian runs down 73 floors, escapes death Ahmedabad, September 13 “Immediately after the attack, there was total chaos. Everyone started fleeing through the stairs as lifts went out of order,’’ said Mr Patel, a Gujarati working with a software company on the 73rd floor of the first tower of the WTC. He was at work when the first plane crashed into their building.
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4 Lanka ministers
quit over deal Colombo, September 13 The ministers said they would not seek positions in the new 20-member Cabinet expected to be named tomorrow, halving the number of ministers under terms of the coalition deal.
Reuters |
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