A man, apparently distraught at the outcome of last week’s presidential election, climbed into the pit marking the spot in New York where the twin towers once stood, and shot himself, authorities said at the weekend.
City police told reporters the body of Andrew Veal (25) of Athens, Georgia, was discovered in the restricted area around the wreckage of the World Trade Centre on Friday night with a shotgun and a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey by his side. He is believed to have died from a head wound.
Veal left no note, but his colleagues from the University of Georgia, where he helped oversee political polling, said that he was a passionate opponent of the war on Iraq, and of George Bush.
”I’m absolutely sure it’s a protest,” Mary Anne Mauney, Veal’s supervisor, told the New York Daily News on Sunday. ”I don’t know what made him commit suicide, but where he did it was symbolic.”
It was unclear how Veal entered the site, which is off-limits to visitors, and is guarded by security personnel and a 2,5-metre fence. Police were first alerted to Veal’s presence by a guest at a nearby hotel who had a room overlooking the area.
Veal was last seen on election night, and when he did not turn up for work the following morning, his colleagues initially assumed that he had stayed away because he was upset at the outcome.
However, Veal’s family later became alarmed when he failed to return his mother’s phone calls, or to arrive on the West Coast, where he had been planning a reunion with his fiancee. – Guardian Unlimited Â