Terrorist attack
destroys World Trade Center
Washington hit by
apparently coordinated attack
NEW YORK
(AP)—Mounting an audacious attack against the United States,
terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and
brought down the twin 110-story towers Tuesday morning. A jetliner also
slammed into the Pentagon as the seat of government itself came under
attack.
The twin
110-story towers of New York’s World Trade Center smolder and burn
Tuesday morning before collapsing less than an hour later. The assault on
the towers began at 8:45 a.m. when a hijacked commercial airplane crashed
into the north tower of the Center. Photo by Larry Busacca / Wireimage
Hundreds
were apparently killed aboard the jets, and untold numbers were feared
dead in the rubble. Thousands were injured in New York alone.
A fourth
jetliner, also apparently hijacked, crashed in Pennsylvania.
President
Bush ordered a full-scale investigation to "hunt down the folks who
committed this act."
Authorities
were still trying to evacuate those who work in the twin towers when the
glass-and-steel skyscrapers came down in a thunderous roar within about 90
minutes after the attacks, which took place 18 minutes apart around 9 a.m.
Many people were feared trapped. About 50,000 people work at the Trade
Center and tens of thousands of others visit each day.
Officials
said the Trade Center apparently was hit by two planes carrying a total of
157 people: United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 bound from Boston to
Los Angeles with 65 people on board, and American Airlines Flight 11, a
Los Angeles-bound jet hijacked after takeoff from Boston with 92 people
aboard.
Law
enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the
Pentagon was hit by American Flight 77, which was seized while carrying 64
people from Washington to Los Angeles.
And in
Pennsylvania, United Flight 93, a Boeing 757 en route from Newark, N.J.,
to San Francisco, crashed about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh with 45
people aboard. A Virginia congressman, Rep. James Moran, said the intended
target of that plane was apparently Camp David, the presidential retreat
in Maryland, 85 miles away.
Altogether,
the four planes carried 266 people. There was no word on any survivors.
At the
Trade Center, people on fire leaped from the windows to certain death,
including a man and a woman holding hands. Some jumped from as high as the
80th floor as the planes exploded into fireballs. People on the ground
screamed and dived for cover as debris from the 1,250-foot towers rained
down. Dazed office workers covered in gray ash wandered around like
ghosts, weeping, trying to make sense of what happened.
Donald
Burns, 34, who had been at a meeting on the 82nd floor, saw four severely
burned people on the stairwell. "I tried to help them but they didn’t
want anyone to touch them. The fire had melted their skin. Their clothes
were tattered," he said.
"People
were screaming, falling and jumping out of the windows," from high in
the sky, said Jennifer Brickhouse, 34, of Union, N.J., who was going up
the escalator into the World Trade Center.
Within the
hour after the attack in New York, the Pentagon took a direct, devastating
hit from a plane. The fiery crash collapsed one side of the five-sided
structure.
Speculation
about the attack quickly focused on terrorist fugitive Osama bin Laden.
"No
one has been ruled out, but our initial feeling is that this is the work
of bin Laden," said a high-ranking federal law enforcement official
who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He is top of our list at this
point."
"This
is perhaps the most audacious terrorist attack that’s ever taken place
in the world," said Chris Yates, an aviation expert at Jane’s
Transport in London. "It takes a logistics operation from the terror
group involved that is second to none. Only a very small handful of terror
groups is on that list. ... I would name at the top of the list Osama bin
Laden."
The
president put the military on its highest level of alert. Authorities in
Washington immediately called out troops, including an infantry regiment,
and the Navy sent aircraft carriers and guided missile destroyers to New
York and Washington.
The White
House, the Pentagon and the Capitol were evacuated along with other
federal buildings in Washington and New York. The president was taken to
Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, headquarters for the Strategic Air
Command, the nation’s nuclear strike force, the White House said. Later,
he headed back to Washington.
The U.S.
and Canadian borders were sealed, security was tightened at naval
installations and other strategic points, and all commercial air traffic
across the country was halted until at least noon on Wednesday.
"This
is the second Pearl Harbor. I don’t think that I overstate it,"
said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. The Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor killed nearly 2,400 people and drew the United States into World
War II.
Sen. John
McCain, R-Ariz., said: "These attacks clearly constitute an act of
war."
In June, a
U.S. judge had set Wednesday as the sentencing date for a bin Laden
associate for his role in the 1998 bombing of a U.S. embassy in Tanzania
that killed 213 people. The sentencing had been set for the federal
courthouse near the World Trade Center. But the sentencing had been
postponed some time ago without being rescheduled.
Afghanistan’s
hardline Taliban rulers condemned the attacks and rejected suggestions
that bin Laden was behind them, saying he does not have the means to carry
out such well-orchestrated attacks. Bin Laden has been given asylum in
Afghanistan.
Abdel-Bari
Atwan, editor of the Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, said he received a
warning from Islamic fundamentalists close to bin Laden, but did not take
the threat seriously. "They said it would be a huge and unprecedented
attack but they did not specify," Atwan said in a telephone interview
in London.
In the West
Bank city of Nablus, thousands of Palestinians celebrated the attacks,
chanting "God is Great" and handing out candy.
In New
York, the downtown area was cordoned off and a rescue effort was under
way. Hundreds of volunteers and medical workers converged on triage
centers, offering help and blood. Paramedics waiting to be sent into the
rubble were told that "once the smoke clears, it’s going to be
massive bodies," said Brian Stark, a former Navy paramedic who
volunteered to help.
He said the
paramedics had been told that hundreds of police and firefighters were
missing from the ranks of those sent in to respond to the first crash.
Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani said 2,100 people were injured—1,500 "walking
wounded" who were taken to New Jersey, and 600 others who were taken
to area hospitals, 150 of them in critical condition. It could take weeks
to dig through the rubble for victims.
"I
have a sense it’s a horrendous number of lives lost," Giuliani
said. "Right now we have to focus on saving as many lives as
possible."
By evening,
huge clouds of smoke still billowed from the ruins, obscuring much of the
skyline. Also, fire raged at an adjoining 47-story part of the World Trade
Center complex, and the evacuated building was in danger of collapse, the
Fire Department said.
The two
planes blasted fiery, gaping holes in the upper floors of one of New York’s
most famous landmarks and rained debris on the streets. About an hour
later, the southern tower collapsed with a roar and a huge cloud of smoke;
the other tower fell about a half-hour after that, covering lower
Manhattan in heaps of gray rubble and broken glass.
On the
street, a crowd mobbed a man at a pay phone, screaming at him to get off
the phone so that they could call relatives. Dust and dirt flew
everywhere. Ash was 2 to 3 inches deep in places.
John Axisa,
who was getting off a commuter train to the World Trade Center, said he
saw "bodies falling out" of the building. He said he ran
outside, and watched people jump out of the first building. Then there was
a second explosion, and he felt heat on the back of neck.
David Reck
was handing out literature for a candidate for public advocate a few
blocks away when he saw a jet come in "very low, and then it made a
slight twist and dove into the building."
People ran
down the stairs in panic and fled the building. Thousands of pieces of
what appeared to be office paper drifted over Brooklyn, about three miles
away.
Several
subway lines were immediately shut down. Trading on Wall Street was
suspended. New York’s mayoral primary election Tuesday was postponed.
All bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were closed.
The death
toll on the crashed planes alone could surpass that of the Oklahoma City
bombing on April 19, 1995, which claimed 168 lives in what was the
deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil.
"Today
we’ve had a national tragedy," Bush said in Sarasota, Fla.
"Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an
apparent terrorist attack on our country." He said he would be
returning immediately to Washington.
Evacuations
were ordered at the United Nations in New York and at the Sears Tower in
Chicago. Los Angeles mobilized its anti-terrorism division. Walt Disney
World in Orlando, Fla., was evacuated, and Hoover Dam on the
Arizona-Nevada line was closed to visitors.
Terrorists
blew up a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center in February
1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others.
"It’s
just sick. It just shows how vulnerable we really are," Keith Meyers,
39, said in Columbus, Ohio. "It kind of makes you want to go home and
spend time with your family. It puts everything in perspective,"
Meyers said. He said he called to check in with his wife. They have two
young children.
In 1945, an
Army Air Corps B-25, a twin-engine bomber, crashed into the 79th floor of
the Empire State Building in dense fog.
In Florida,
Bush was reading to children in a classroom at 9:05 a.m. when his chief of
staff, Andrew Card, whispered into his ear. The president briefly turned
somber before he resumed reading. He addressed the tragedy about a
half-hour later.
Before the
crash in Pennsylvania, an emergency dispatcher in Westmoreland County,
Pa., received a cell phone call at 9:58 a.m. from a man who said he was a
passenger locked in the bathroom of United Flight 93, said dispatch
supervisor Glenn Cramer.
"We
are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!" Cramer quoted the man as
saying. The man told dispatchers the plane "was going down. He heard
some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane and we
lost contact with him," Cramer said.