New York | Friday
AMERICAN authorities have arrested two teams of men at New York airports – said to be armed with knives and carrying fake identification papers.
In foiling what they feared was a second wave of attacks yesterday, authorities said they took into custody four men and a woman at John F. Kennedy International Airport, and five men at LaGuardia International Airport. The airports were then shut. ABC news quoted sources as saying the men were carrying knives with plastic handles, along with bags identifying them as flight crews.
Several of those detained on Thursday showed up at the airport with tickets for flights cancelled on Tuesday and tried to use them, officials said.
The Washington Post reports that the men were also said to carrying certificates from a flight training school in Florida – which investigators say was attended by some members of the previous hijacking teams.
The paper quoted the FBI as saying it had identified at least 18 hijackers who had conducted Tuesday’s suicidal assaults. Sixteen of the men have been directly or indirectly linked to the terrorist network run by Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden, according to a government source.
The newspaper said the group at JFK airport had originally been booked on a flight from New York to Los Angeles on Tuesday, but their flight was cancelled after the World Trade Center bombings, a source said.
At Kennedy airport, about 20 police officers, many in SWAT gear, stormed an American Airlines jetliner on Thursday, subduing one man and handcuffing two others, a passenger aboard the plane told ABC News.
Passenger Jim Hunter said he and others aboard American Airlines Flight 133, scheduled to fly from New York to Los Angeles, had sat on the plane for hours before police entered the jetliner.
He told ABC that ”about 20 or more police officers, many in SWAT gear with large guns all unholstered” stormed the plane and screamed to the passengers ”to go and hit the floor.”
”Meanwhile, there was a commotion going on behind me — about four or five rows behind me — where they were subduing a passenger and he was definitely resisting and trying to fight off,” Hunter told ABC.
”It was obviously worthless given how many policemen were on the airplane. And then two other passengers that were right in front of me were ultimately asked to go with authorities as well. They were taken to a galley, handcuffed and then led off the plane from the front as well,” he added.
These developments came as rescue workers and firefighters worked under arc lights with diminishing hopes of finding anyone left alive among the thousands buried beneath the smouldering ruins of the World Trade Center.
New York’s mayor Rudy Giuliani told a news conference on Thursday morning that 4 763 people were missing in the ruins, but the number could rise.
He said 94 bodies had been recovered so far, and that 46 of them had been identified. Secretary of State Colin Powell said for the first time on Thursday that Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden was the prime suspect as the mastermind of the lethal strikes. – Reuters, Sapa, Own Correspondent