FBI ploughs all resources into investigation
As rescue workers today continued to search the carnage in New York and Washington, the investigation to hunt down the men behind the world’s worst terrorist outrage began in earnest.
The New York Port Authority estimated the total death toll could reach 20,000.
Ten thousand shoppers in a mall under the WTC were feared killed and a further 10,000 in the towers themselves, the authority said.
With the finger of suspicion increasingly pointing at terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, the identities of more than a dozen of the men who hijacked four planes with knives and threats of bombs has been ascertained, officials told reporters.
Some 4,000 FBI agents worked to track down the men, with the massive investigation stretching from the Canadian border, where they suspect some of the hijackers entered the country, to Florida, where some of the participants are believed to have learned how to fly commercial jetliners before the attacks.
At least six people were detained across the country on unrelated charges.
The FBI made clear none had been arrested on suspicion of the attack.
Houses in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Florida were searched for evidence and the FBI issued photos of two suspects who had stayed in Florida - Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi.
An FBI source said the two men had boarded a flight from Boston on Tuesday,
FBI officers searched two houses in the Vero Beach area of Florida and seized computer equipment. One man, believed to be an acquaintance of the two men, was detained.
Both houses had been occupied by two men who said they were Saudi pilots on a 15-month pilot’s course at the Huffman Aviation school in the state, according to reports.
An Arabic flight training manual and a copy of the Koran were discovered in a rented car at Boston’s Logan Airport, believed to have been hired by the two men.
A heavily-armed raid of a Boston hotel was staged but no one was detained.
Elsewhere three men were detained for questioning by state police, according to reprost, after an inter-city train from Boston was stopped and searched in Providence, Rhode Island.
It also emerged that the American Government believed there was a ‘‘credible threat’’ that the White House and Air Force One, the presidential jet, were targets for the terrorists.
A White House spokesman said intelligence now suggested the plane which crashed into the Pentagon was originally headed for the White House.
The spokesman said President George Bush landed in Louisiana and then went to Nebraska because his security in the air or in Washington could not be guaranteed.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who led allied troops in the Gulf conflict, described the attacks as ‘‘a war not just against the United States’’ but ‘‘a war against civilisation’’.
His comments were later backed up by Washington’s Nato allies who declared that the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington could be considered an attack on the whole alliance.
US Congress agreed a package of $20bn (£13.6bn) to aid rescue efforts, protect national security and help trace the terrorists responsible.
Across the globe there were fears of further attacks, of the damage that could be done to the world economy, and of the many long-term implications of a new and terrifying form of terrorism against which the US was defenceless.
But for thousands of families there was the terrible dread for loved ones who went to work or boarded planes but have not been heard of since.
Chilling accounts emerged of passengers on the hijacked jets making final calls to their loved ones just second before they died and evidence that some facing death went down fighting.
Establishing the death toll could take weeks. The four airliners alone had 266 people aboard and there were no survivors. Officials put the number of dead and wounded at the Pentagon at up to 200.
