Mail & Guardian reporters
New York City had received more than 11 000 body bags by Thursday, although the number of dead from the terror attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon remains uncertain.
The body bags were sent to hospitals in the city. They were carried by a convoy of tractor trailers accompanied by tight police security. The convoy parked on Second Avenue in Manhattan outside Bellevue hospital included 10 refrigerated trucks that can carry 1000 bodies. There is yet no indication whether all the body bags will be used.
As the Mail & Guardian went to press on Thursday evening, a reasonably accurate death toll appeared to be days away.
The only figures known were the 300 firefighters and police missing and believed killed when the two towers of the World Trade Centre collapsed on Tuesday, and confirmation by New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani that 82 bodies had been recovered from the destroyed buildings. City officials fear that the total number of dead will be in the thousands. There were 266 people on the four planes turned into fuel-laden missiles by hijackers.
There are 3 700 people missing in the wake of the terror strike that toppled New York’s landmark twin towers, Giuliani said on Thursday.
The Pentagon was expected to fully reopen on Thursday, two days after a hijacked plane slammed into a section of the US military headquarters.
Armed services officials have said that about 200 military and civilian workers are missing and feared dead.
At the World Trade Centre, emergency workers used everything from heavy machinery to their bare hands to sift through the wreckage while sniffer dogs searched the rubble.
“They are sending the dogs in. When the dogs get a hit, they dig,” said Chief Lawrence Cleary of the Fire Department from the scene of the rescue effort. “But as time goes on, it doesn’t look good for finding survivors.”
Rescue teams pulled bodies from the Pentagon through the night on Wednesday as engineers worked to shore up the structure to make the site safe for an all-out search of the rubble, officials said on Thursday.
The teams who went into the caved-in section of the Pentagon late on Wednesday began the grim work of retrieving bodies they encountered in the process, said Richard Bridges, spokesperson for Arlington County, Virginia, which is directing the effort.
Bridges would not say how many bodies have been recovered and Pentagon officials still would not comment on the number of people unaccounted for since an American Airlines Boeing 757 crashed into the building.
Countries around the world were beginning to count the number of their citizens killed.
One South African immigrant to the US was among the 92 people on board the first aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Centre. Edmund Glazer (41) was the chief financial officer for a company in Los Angeles. Two South Africans who worked in the centre are missing, presumed dead. Craig Gibson, formerly of Benoni, was last seen on the 95th floor of one of the towers. The family of Nicholas Rowe, who was visiting the 106th floor of the centre, believe he is dead.
Britain says the number of its citizens confirmed killed is approaching 100. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said “the total number of British deaths is unlikely to be less than the middle hundreds and maybe higher”.
Austrailia says three of its nationals were confirmed dead. Another 90 who were in the vicinity of the centre at the time of the attacks are still unaccounted for.
At least 50 Bangladeshis were killed in the centre, where many worked in restaurants and offices.
Two Japanese were on the hijacked planes, and another 20 who were in the centre are missing. South Korea has listed 27 of its nationals as missing. Seven Italians are missing. Six of them worked in the centre.
Since the attacks, anti-Islamic sentiment has turned to violence in the US. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at an Arab-American community centre in Chicago. In New York, a 75-year-old drunken man tried to run over a Pakistani woman in a shopping mall parking lot. He then followed her into a shop and threatened to kill her for “destroying my country”.