Yankee Stadium stages prayer service

New York's Yankee Stadium has became a house of prayer as thousands of people take part in an inter-faith service for the victims of terrorism.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has been careful to call it a prayer service, rather than a memorial service, insisting that hope is not yet lost for some of the 6,333 people missing in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre.

But no survivors have been pulled alive from the ruins since the day after the disaster on September 11.

The hosts for the service at the baseball park in the Bronx are Oprah Winfrey and James Earl Jones, and the programme includes prayers led by Cardinal Edward Egan and Imam Izak-El Pasha, as well as patriotic and inspirational songs led by Bette Midler, Placido Domingo and Lee Greenwood.

Mourners arriving for the service had to run a gauntlet of police officers and state troopers checking tickets. No bags, backpacks or coolers were allowed, and police officers were stationed in the stadium's lighting towers.

Small American flags and roses were distributed to worshippers as they arrived. The stadium was bedecked with flowers and red-white-and-blue bunting. The flags that had been positioned at half-mast since thge tragedy have been returned to the tops of their poles.

Carlos Rivera, a handyman from the Bronx, said he wanted to pray and to comfort all those people affected by the tragedy, adding: "We are also here to pray for those on the other side."

Retired nurse's assistant Gloria Rice, of Harlem, wore a stars-and-stripes bandanna on her head and an American flag on her T-shirt.

She said: "I'm here because I felt it my duty as an American citizen to support the police, the fire workers and so many others trying to help."

Meanwhile, the grim work of searching through the wreckage of the World Trade Centre continues in lower Manhattan, and the business of trying to return to a semblance of normality goes on throughout the city.