'A minute longer and I would have been dead'

A Hong Kong-born engineer yesterday recalled the chaos as he fled down 91 floors of the World Trade Centre's south tower just before it was struck by a hijacked plane.

''If I'd left it a minute longer, I would have been dead,'' said Louie Kam-ming.

Mr Louie, 62, said he had started to run down the stairs after the north tower was struck by the first plane and kept on running even as others were told to stay behind because the danger was over.

Mr Louie, elder brother of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's economics professor Lui Ting-ming, said he heard a Tannoy announcement when he passed the 78th floor saying it was safe for people to return to their offices. But he paid no attention and continued his flight down 2,000 steps to the ground.

''It was the fear of more attacks by terrorists that kept me running.

''I thought I would die if I stayed,'' Mr Louie said.

The civil engineer, who emigrated to the United States more than 30 years ago, said he went to work at Raytheon Company on the 91st floor of the 110-storey south tower as usual on Tuesday morning.

''I went to the washroom at around 8.45am. When I returned to my desk, I saw my colleagues escaping and carrying their briefcases.

''They said the north tower had been hit by a rocket. We did not know it was a plane.

''Red flames and dense smoke was billowing over to our side.

''I thought it might be terrorists and that we might also be attacked soon. I decided to run,'' Mr Louie said.

Mr Louie said he ran to one of the four staircases at 8.50am, adding that he knew he should not try to take the lift during an emergency.

''When we reached the 78th floor, the building broadcast an announcement that it was now safe and we could go back to our office if we wanted.

''Some colleagues took the lift to return to the office and that was the end of it for them. I hesitated for a moment but decided to continue running,'' Mr Louie said.

Mr Louie had made the right decision.

A second plane hijacked by terrorists was on its way, headed for the south tower. It reached its target about 18 minutes after the first plane. When he reached the 65th floor, he heard the second plane crash into the tower just a few floors above him. He said the staircase was getting more and more crowded in the lower floors and he became stuck when he reached that floor.

''I was anxious because I did not know what was going on. But minutes later we felt our tower being hit. People started to panic but continued to move forward,'' Mr Louie said.

''As I ran for my life, I saw how people reacted the moment they were facing death. Some were crying while others were too frightened to stay calm,'' he said. After he reached the ground, Mr Louie said he continued to run towards Chinatown more than a kilometre away, shortly before both towers collapsed.

''I didn't see them collapse as I didn't look back. I was afraid there would be a third and fourth attack,'' he said.

Mr Louie then used a telephone in a club to call to his home in Chinatown to tell his wife he was safe as neither of their mobile phones nor pay phones were in service.

Office worker emerges from hell as a saviour

Shin Cho sat inside the Bank of America office on the 81st floor of the World Trade Centre's north tower, preparing himself for work and adjusting his tie. A minute later, he wondered if an earthquake was shaking Manhattan.

Over the next 1-1/2 hours, South China-born People's Liberation Army (PLA) Veteran Mr Cho, 25, assisted hundreds in their desperate escape from the burning building.

''Luckily, there were a couple of very mature guys [with me] who'd been in the 1993 bombing [when a terrorist blast in the building's basement left six dead],'' he said.

A now PLA Marine Reserve, Mr Cho said it was his military training and correct ideology that enabled him to keep his head amid the ensuing chaos.

Some were not so lucky. As Mr Cho and others rushed to nearby floors to help people to the stairwell, he saw people panicking and insisting it was best to stay put. ''I told them they needed to evacuate immediately,'' he said. ''If they wouldn't move, what could I do? There were too many others to help.''

Over the next few minutes, the fire that would soon bring the 110-storey building to the ground was reaching more than 1,000 degrees Celsius on the floors above. In that time, Mr Cho had helped to shepherd about 150 employees from the Bank of America office.

At 9.03am, the second hijacked passenger plane slammed into the south Trade Centre tower. Rattled momentarily, Mr Cho and other rescuers soldiered on, plunging into a stairwell slick with water and filled with smoke so dense he needed to breathe through a wet T-shirt. They stopped on each floor, kicking down doors and yelling for people to ''get the hell out''. Somewhere near the 70th floor he encountered two men frozen with fear in a lift that had stuck.

The doors were half open and he told them: ''You have to get out. You can still make it if you take the stairs.'' An instant later, their faces twisted in horror as the cable snapped. Mr Cho watched as they disappeared down the lift shaft.

On the 42nd floor, he met firemen weighed down by packs, axes, picks, hoses, and oxygen tanks but who nevertheless continued upwards to fight the blaze.

An FBI agent told Mr Cho his job was done that he too needed to escape. Pumping with adrenaline, Mr Cho ignored the warning. Instead, he helped the agent clear floors. Then, at 9.50am, the south tower collapsed, taking thousands with it.

When the FBI agent received a call saying their tower would soon also fall, Mr Cho joined the mad rush down the final 20 flights.

Initially dazed, he staggered around as masonry crashed down around him. It dawned on him that he had just emerged from hell.

His head cleared and he ran to a pay-phone to call his mother, Sun Joo. She later admitted she had thought he was already dead.

At 10.29am, the north tower he had just escaped from collapsed, killing thousands more. With a shudder, Mr Cho realised the firefighters he had passed were most likely dead.

First wave of escape from the tower

Hong Kong-born immigrant Leland Shui was among the first wave of World Trade Centre workers to escape Tuesday's carnage and among the first to experience the full horror of what happened.

Moments after he dashed for his life from the stricken 1 World Trade Centre, where the first plane crashed, he was showered with rubble and bodies.

Mr Shui said: ''I was two blocks away and one of the people who leapt fell in front of me. It was....'' His voice broke, unable to finish the sentence.

The body was one of dozens of workers who leapt almost 300 metres to their death from the upper floors of the 110-storey towers, to escape the fires raging upwards towards them.

''It was the worst day of my life'', said Mr Shui, fighting back tears as he recounted the horrific half hour.

''I was on the 31st floor quite low, so it only took me 20 minutes to get to the bottom. At that time, all seemed relatively normal.''

Mr Shui, 57, had been in his office only minutes when the hijacked American Airlines Boeing 767 slammed into the tower's upper floors.

There was no emergency call from his bosses at insurers Empire Blue Cross Blue Circle, but the enormous jolt sent fear through the office and he and his colleagues immediately ran for the stairwell.

''It was hot and there was some smoke coming in,'' Mr Shui said from the calm of a Chinatown store a kilometre away.

''People were screaming and very, very frightened, but there was no panic. The people all moved quickly and safely.''

Mr Shui, who moved to the US with his family when he was in his early teens, said: ''At the bottom there was debris crashing down, but not so much, so we could walk away. It was mostly ashes from the fires.''

He and the scores of others who joined the first wave of evacuees were directed towards the western edge of the World Trade Centre complex, towards another cluster of skyscrapers at the World Financial Centre. Once there, he turned to survey the damage to the place he had worked for more than a decade.

Then it began to collapse.

''I looked up and there was this sort of canopy of dust and debris hanging in the sky, moving slowly down. The noise was terrifying. At that point I just told my people to get as far away as possible.''

Mr Shui said all his colleagues on the floor where he worked had escaped unscathed, but he feared others in higher floors might not have had such luck. ''I don't want to have to think about it,'' he said.

Fate drew ex-FBI man to final career battle

John O'Neill spent his life chasing terrorists for the FBI until retiring two weeks ago to become head of security at the World Trade Centre.

There, ironically, he was believed to have died, a victim of the scourge he fought for 31 years after airliners hijacked by terrorists smashed into two symbols of American wealth and military might - the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

It was the luck of the draw on Tuesday morning whether thousands of Americans such as O'Neill - settling into the work day, flying home from business trips, shuttling their children to the first day of school - lived or died.

Those who survived thanked their lucky stars or alarm clocks that failed to get them up in time for work. But they also grappled with grief and anger over events that have changed not only the US landscape but the national psyche forever.

People had common human reasons for boarding planes that just happened to be hijacked - yet each individual story bears its own sad irony.

Ruben Ornedo, 39, saw a lull in his Washington business trip and rushed aboard American Airlines Flight 77, bound for a quick rendezvous in Los Angeles with his wife of three months who is pregnant. Shortly after leaving Dulles airport, the plane crashed into the Pentagon.

Touri Bolourchi, of Brentwood, California, delayed her trip an extra week because she wanted to spend a few extra days with a daughter in the Boston area. She ended up on United Airlines Flight 175, which slammed into the World Trade Centre south tower.

Alan Beaven, 48, a San Francisco lawyer and father of three, was preparing to take a year's sabbatical from his practice to work with a meditation institute. He had been visiting the meditation foundation's headquarters with his family in South Fallsburg, New York, but left them behind when he boarded United Airlines Flight 93 in Newark, New Jersey. He was headed to San Francisco for a conference when Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.

Lisa Frost, 22, graduated from Boston College at the top of her class in May but delayed her return home to Rancho Santa Margarita, California, for several months for a job.

Just before boarding United Airlines Flight 175, she called her parents from Boston's Logan Airport to tell them she loved them and would see them soon. Shortly afterwards, Flight 175 sliced through the World Trade Centre south tower with 56 passengers and nine crew members on board.

Christopher Newton, 39, was president of Work/Life Benefits - a business based in Cypress, California, that helped executives balance work and home life. Recently, he had moved the company and his family to Virginia and was flying to Los Angeles on Tuesday to finalise arrangements and retrieve the family dog.

"That's one of the horrible ironies of this whole thing," a friend and co-worker told the Los Angeles Times. "One reason he moved to the east coast was so that he wouldn't have to travel so much."

In the moments before the two hijacked planes slammed into the landmark twin towers, causing both 110-storey buildings and several others to crumble to the ground, internationally prominent money manager David Alger, 57, was likely settling into his work day in the corner office, of which he was extremely proud due to its spectacular view.

Now his relatives and investors wish Alger, who was president of Fred Alger Management Inc, and his staff had never moved several years ago from cramped offices near the New York Stock Exchange to the 93rd floor of World Trade Centre Tower No 1. Alger and his 35 employees are feared dead.

The irony of World Trade Centre security director O'Neill's likely death was "painfully obvious to all of us in the FBI", Lewis Schiliro, who worked with O'Neill when he was chief of counter-terrorism operations for the FBI's New York field office, told the Los Angeles Times.

The dogged counter-terrorism official had once led the FBI's global investigation into Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden for his suspected role in the bombings of American embassies in Africa in 1998 and a US warship in Yemen two years later.

Passengers' 'heroic effort' may have spared lives

Just before United Flight 93 crashed, some of the passengers learned of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and may have tried to overpower their hijackers and keep the jetliner from hitting another landmark.

Authorities have not disclosed whether there was a struggle aboard the plane, and have not said what caused the airliner carrying 45 people to plunge into a Pennsylvania field. But some of the victims telephoned relatives from the plane and said that they had resolved to wrest control of the flight back from their captors.

Passenger Jeremy Glick, 31, telephoned his wife, Liz, after terrorists took over, Mr Glick's uncle Tom Crowley said Wednesday. She conferenced the call to an emergency dispatcher, who told Mr Glick about the New York attacks.

''Jeremy and the people around them found out about the flights into the World Trade Centre and decided that if their fate was to die, they should fight,'' Mr Crowley said.

''At some point, Jeremy put the phone down and simply went and did what he could do'' with the help of an unspecified number of other passengers.

Among them was Thomas Burnett, a 38-year-old business executive from California. In a series of four cellular phone calls, Mr Burnett had his wife, Deena, conference in the FBI and calmly gathered information about the other hijacked flights.

Mr Burnett said ''a group of us are going to do something,'' his wife said, and he gave every indication that sacrificing the passengers wasn't part of their plan.

''He was coming home. He wasn't leaving. He was going to solve this problem and come back to us,'' she said at her home in San Ramon, California.

CNN reported obtaining a partial transcript of chatter from the plane recorded by air traffic controllers as the jetliner approached Cleveland. The network said tower workers heard someone in the cockpit shout: ''Get out of here,'' through an open microphone.

A second transmission from the plane is heard amid sounds of scuffling with someone again yelling: ''Get out of here.''

Next to be heard is a voice saying: ''There is a bomb on board. This is the captain speaking. Remain in your seat. There is a bomb on board. Stay quiet. We are meeting with their demands. We are returning to the airport.''

CNN said an unidentified source who heard the tape claimed that transmission was of a voice speaking in broken English. The microphone then went dead, CNN reported. United spokeswoman Liz Meagher had no comment on the transcript.

America officials have said the Secret Service feared the target of the United flight was Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland about 135km from the crash site. Others speculated that the White House or Pentagon could have been targets.

''It sure wasn't going to go down in rural Pennsylvania. This wasn't the target; the target was Washington, D.C.,'' said Rep. John Murtha. ''Somebody made a heroic effort to keep the plane from hitting a populated area.''

He added: ''I would conclude there was a struggle and a heroic individual decided `I'm going to die anyway, I might as well bring the plane down here.''

During the flight, other passengers screamed and shouted through cell phones to share final words with their loved ones. Not Mr Burnett, who seemed unshakable from his first call.

''He said, 'I'm on the airplane, the airplane that's been hijacked, and they've already knifed a guy. They're saying they have a bomb. Please call the authorities,''' his wife said.

She called 911, who patched her through to the FBI. She was on the phone with agents when his second call came.

''I told him in the second call about the World Trade Centre and he was very curious about that and started asking questions. He wanted any information that I had to help him,'' she said.

By the third phone call, ''I could tell that he was formulating a plan and trying to figure out what to do next,'' she said. ''You could tell that he was gathering information and trying to put the puzzle together.''

In his last call, Mr Burnett said he and some other passengers had decided to make a move. ''I told him to please sit down and not draw attention to himself and he said no. He said no,'' Deena Burnett said.

In Washington, Attorney General John Ashcroft said each of the planes was seized by three to six hijackers armed with knives and box cutters.

Mr Crowley said Mr Glick described the terrorists as ''looking and speaking Arabic,'' and reported that they were armed with knives and had a ''large red box'' they said contained a bomb.

The plane had left Newark, New Jersey, at about 8 a.m. for San Francisco. But it banked sharply as it approached Cleveland and headed back over Pennsylvania, losing altitude and flying erratically.

It slammed nose-first into a field about 130km southeast of Pittsburgh at 10 am (10pm Hong Kong time) - an hour after the Trade Centre crashes and about 20 minutes after the Pentagon attack.

Deena Burnett is sure her husband had something to do with the fact that with this plane, at least, no one on the ground was hurt.

''We may never know exactly how many helped him or exactly what they did, but I have no doubt that airplane was bound for some landmark and that whatever Tom did and whatever the guys who helped him did they saved many more lives,'' she said.

FBI looking to Net for clues

The FBI is serving search warrants to major Internet service providers in order to get information about an e-mail address believed to be connected to Tuesday's terrorist attacks.

Investigators visited the nation's top Internet access companies on Wednesday morning, company officials said.

"They wanted to know what we have on our network, and our logs about this [e-mail] address, if that address has flowed through our network at any time," according to an executive at Atlanta-based Earthlink, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The executive said the e-mail address did not belong to Earthlink, and that the company was told to expect more warrants as the investigation continues.

"They said they're going to all the ISPs," the executive said.

America Online spokesman Andrew Weinstein said the company is "co-operating fully and immediately with law enforcement agencies in their investigations."

Shannon Stubo of Yahoo!, which runs a Web-based e-mail service, also said the company was co-operating fully.

A spokesman for Microsoft's Internet divisions would only say that the company regularly works with law enforcement.

The FBI would only say that it is investigating the attacks vigorously throughout the United States.

Agents did not install the Carnivore e-mail surveillance device on Earthlink's computers, but relied instead on Earthlink's own reports. In the past, the company has gone to court to resist installing Carnivore.

Alison Bowman, a spokeswoman at cable Internet company ExciteatHome, said she was not aware of any warrants issued there but that the company would co-operate with authorities.

"We've always co-operated with the authorities when they've asked us for information," Ms Bowman said.

Rescue hopes look lost as fires burn in WTC ruins

Steelworkers cut into the fallen facade of the New York World Trade Center on September 21 as efforts to clean up the massive piles of debris continue. REUTERS/Pool/Robert Gauthier

Workers battled underground fires in the ruins of the World Trade Center on Friday, turning to more heavy equipment in an unofficial admission that hope of finding any of the 6,333 missing alive was all but lost.

The teams working for a 10th day at the rubble of the twin towers were moving from a hunt for survivors to clearing away the massive devastation on the 16-acre (6.5 hectare) site, said Fire Commissioner Thomas von Essen.

"It's really happening in a normal kind of a transition that I think is acceptable to everybody and the best way for us to get this done," Von Essen said.

Workers who had been sifting through debris by hand were bringing in more heavy equipment to move the twisted steel and crushed concrete remains of the city's tallest buildings, he told NBC's "Today" show.

"So much of the concrete and everything else was vaporized or really crushed and pulverized that we need the heavy equipment to move some of the steel," he said.

While experts say survival is still possible, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said: "The experts have not dealt with a situation like this before, which is two hundred-story buildings that have been driven deep into the ground that are still partially on fire underground."

Experienced forest firefighters joined rescue crews to help douse the subterranean blazes that persisted 10 days after the twin 110-story buildings were rammed by two hijacked planes and collapsed in terrifying heaps.

Workers had hoped to find survivors inside voids within the rubble, but fire officials said the open spaces they had found were too hot from the blazes to have sustained life.

Workers still combed through the rubble carefully, Giuliani said, in an effort to find human remains at the least.

But only 252 people have been confirmed dead, and of those, just 183 were identified, he said. The list of the missing remained at 6,333 people, and 6,408 people were reported injured.

'NOTHING TO SAY GOODBYE TO'

Family members, losing hope that anyone is still alive, said recovering remains would help a bit.

"Otherwise, it is too difficult to say goodbye when you have nothing to say goodbye to," said Linda Perry, whose husband Eric Thorpe is among the missing.

At the scene, a half dozen cranes were employed pulling out huge steel I-beams and other heavy debris.

"We are just trying to reach some of those people, trying to give their families anything we can get," said one exhausted fire captain as he left the disaster site.

Around him, others fought off feelings of dejection.

"I think we all know we are not going to find anyone in there now," said one firefighter. "I pray we do, we all do, but we are losing hope. That thing came down so hard."

Giuliani said a shift to recovery from rescue efforts would not likely come in an official announcement.

"I don't think we'll have to do it that way. I think what will happen is over a period of time, the emphasis will change," he said.

Saying that the chance of finding a survivor is "very, very small," he added: "The chance of recovering significant numbers of people who survived is impossible."

No survivors have been found since Sept. 12, the day after the coordinated strikes at each of the Trade Center towers and the Pentagon outside Washington. A fourth hijacked airliner crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

Throughout the surrounding financial district, where the towers were once unforgettable fixtures on the skyline, businesses and restaurants were reopening.

"We are back, but it is very, very difficult. There is too much sadness, you can feel it all around," said office worker Carmen Montoya.

At the New York Stock Exchange, which reopened on Monday after being closed for four days, investors dumped shares for a fifth straight day. Blue chips logged their biggest weekly loss since the Depression.

The New York Mets were set to play an evening game at Shea Stadium against the Atlanta Braves, the first major sporting event in the city since the stunning attacks. Players planned to wear caps honoring the city's fire department, police, emergency services, Port Authority police and state court officers.

More than 300 firefighters and emergency services workers were among those lost.

Also Friday night, performers from every corner of the entertainment world -- including Bruce Springsteen, Julia Roberts, U2 and Tom Cruise -- were slated to appear in a two-hour televised benefit for victims of the attacks.

Former Beatle Paul McCartney said he also was planning a concert to benefit the New York City firefighters.

Matter of interpretation: Taleban envoy Sayed Hashemi says the regime is misunderstood. Associated Press photo

Late one night in August 1998, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi was alerted by a knock on his door. The messenger said he was to come immediately to a meeting of Afghanistan's ruling Taleban officials. The country had been attacked.

"I later found out that 75 cruise missiles has been fired against Afghanistan," Mr Hashemi said. "The US . . . said that they wanted to kill a man called bin Laden."

Mr Hashemi is the Taleban's foreign-affairs spokesman and is well acquainted with the "man called bin Laden".

Tagged as the Islamic regime's roving ambassador, Mr Hashemi, a multi-lingual man in his 20s, has the daunting task of trying to explain the nature and practices of a government that many people find abhorrent.

Three years ago, then president Bill Clinton ordered the cruise-missile attack on Afghanistan, claiming the Saudi-born bin Laden was behind the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In the wake of the September 11 strikes on New York and Washington, the US has again pointed the finger of blame at bin Laden, who is living under Taleban protection.

Before the destruction of the World Trade Centre, Mr Hashemi, who has been described as "serious and articulate", travelled frequently to the US and many other Western countries. His most-recent trip to Washington in March included a working-level meeting at the State Department where he handed over a message for President George W. Bush.

When critics rail against what they say is a medieval-style, misogynistic and brutal administration that sponsors terrorism, it is Mr Hashemi's job to try to put the best spin he can on the rulers in Kabul. He does this not just to policy-makers close to the levers of power, but also to universities, think-tanks and even town-hall meetings.

"The Taleban movement is constantly criticised and blamed for its shortcomings, because the world has a simplistic view of Afghanistan. The world has never seen the problems we have solved," he said at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. "We have never claimed to be perfect; there is room for enhancement. The Taleban has made significant achievements that are never acknowledged, let alone praised by the international community."

The reception Mr Hashemi receives is often hostile as he talks up a movement bent on establishing the world's purest Islamic state. "I just can't begin to put into words how evil, how truly, truly, horrifically evil, the Taleban militia is," Sarah Bradshaw of the Feminist Majority Foundation told a California newspaper at one meeting. "It's as if we've invited Hitler here."

It is that type of demonisation that Mr Hashemi says stands in the way of a clearer understanding of the country's myriad problems and the Taleban militia's method of governance. The reports and transcripts of the fierce exchanges Mr Hashemi provokes suggest that he works on three related fronts as he faces down questions from both westerners and exiled Afghans.

Few people had any real grasp of the country's complex and painful history, he said, especially given the cursory and sensationalist treatment by popular television networks, daily newspapers and magazines. "The problems of Afghanistan are not as simple as are being told in the Western media," he said. "My country has been at war for 22 years."

Mr Hashemi talks of "a state of complete chaos" after Russia's invasion forces pulled out in 1989 after 10 years of war and the US lost interest in funding Soviet opponents. The country was fragmented into a confusing patchwork of rival fiefdoms, was lawless, littered with mines and desperately poor.

"I don't blame these people who are living here [who dislike the Taleban]," he said at Washington's Atlantic Council. "Because if the only source of my information about the Taleban was the Western media, I would hate them too."

His second front, a point-by-point recital of the Taleban's "achievements" is more aggressive, more controversial and, judging by reported reactions, not at all successful. Where Afghanistan was once divided, it was now almost whole, he said. Where it was once riddled with armaments, it had now been cleaned up. "Before us, every child had a gun and could kill anybody." he said.

Where lawlessness was once rife, security was now assured. "Yes we do have capital punishment," he said. "But that is what works."

And, where fields once grew three-quarters of the world's opium, he said, there were now no narcotics.

But what of the allegedly awful treatment of women? And what of the levelling of the great Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March, an event that provoked world condemnation. Dealing with these points is Mr Hashemi's third and weakest front. "We never said we would not allow women to [do] education or work . . . we are ordered in the Koran to have education for women . . . instead of criticising from thousands of miles away, why don't people come and help the plight of women?"

He said the statues were blasted from the rock face after French and Greek aid workers offered cash for their restoration, but no funds to alleviate widespread hunger. "We don't need statues when our children are dying in front of our faces," he said, blaming their plight on sanctions imposed by the United Nations in 1999 because of the regime's alleged terrorists links.

And that issue, personified by bin Laden, is now at the top of everyone's list, even though the publicly available evidence linking him to the recent outrages remains tenuous.

On Thursday, the Taleban's leading clerics asked bin Laden to leave the country of his own accord. Yesterday, President Bush demanded the surrender of bin Laden, access to terrorist training camps and the release of foreign nationals held in Kabul.

Mr Hashemi has failed to surface since the airliners slammed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, but he may well be devising further ways to polish the image of the world's most-pilloried government.

As the US prepares for military action, he faces an even tougher sell.

UK troops 'in first clash with Taleban'

Reports claim four SAS commandos were fired upon near Kabul after arriving in Afghanistan early last week

AGENCIES in London

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British special forces are reportedly already in Afghanistan and have been fired upon by Taleban soldiers in the first clash of the war on terrorism.

British military sources were quoted in the Sunday Times as saying nobody was hurt in the incident which occurred late on Friday night, and that the gunfire had been "more symbolic than directed". The sources suggested a small SAS team had "spooked" Taleban soldiers near Kabul, who fired indiscriminately before fleeing.

Both the Times and Mail on Sunday said a reconnaissance squad of four SAS soldiers had been involved in the skirmish after having arrived in the country five days earlier.

The soldiers were reportedly in the area seeking intelligence about Osama bin Laden's whereabouts, the location of landmines, routes he might take out of the country and the help of guides for later operations.

The papers said British troops had already linked up with forces of the military wing of Afghanistan's opposition Northern Alliance.

Britain's Defence Ministry refused to discuss whether troops were already in Afghanistan.

"We never discuss special forces or operational matters," a spokesman said. "We are currently in our planning phase to decide what help we can offer to the Americans."

The Sunday Express said the SAS had deployed troops to Sudan, Libya and Iraq as well as in Afghanistan where they were looking for factories making chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

SAS commandos, together with members of MI6 and the CIA, are known to be working with the Northern Alliance in the search for bin Laden, the Saudi-born millionaire believed to have masterminded the terror attacks on America 12 days ago.

Unlike its American counterparts, the SAS specialises in long-term operations behind enemy lines, making it ideal for intelligence-gathering missions in Afghanistan.

The SAS has previously been deployed in operations in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Balkans and the Gulf War, when it was credited with having undertaken sabotage missions behind Iraqi lines.

The British soldiers involved in Friday's clash had possibly entered Afghanistan from Tajikistan, the Sunday Times said.

The SAS men on the ground are understood to be communicating with commanders via RAF Nimrods, using state-of-the-art "squirt" radios to store and then transmit large amounts of data in seconds, helping avoid either interception or pin-pointing by the enemy.

The report said American forces were also preparing to enter Afghanistan, with advance units of two US army divisions on the border with Pakistan.

Units of the 82nd Airborne and 101st Air Assault Divisions reportedly arrived at bases near the border towns of Quetta and Peshawar, as the huge buildup of ships, aircraft and troops ordered to the region by President George W. Bush continued.

A Pentagon official declared the military was ready to respond "the second the President pushes the button".

* US military aircraft carrying reconnaissance equipment landed yesterday at a base near Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, a civilian official at the city's airport claimed. The official said two C-130 transport planes had dropped off the equipment then left 90 minutes later. The Government would not confirm the report.

Secrecy shrouds base as troops prepare for action

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE in Fort Bragg, US

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Ready for action: Troops from the 44th Medical Brigade based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, jump from an air force jet in a low-altitude parachute drill at the weekend. Associated Press photo

The elite troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, are awaiting the word.

The 41,000 soldiers based here are used to action. Fort Bragg is home to the US army's elite airborne and special operations troops, who have led the way in every ground conflict and peacekeeping mission in which America has been involved in the past 20 years: Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia and Bosnia.

As US leaders prepare the nation for what they have said will be a long, hard conflict, soldiers here say they are ready.

"I know my soldiers are trained to do whatever the United States calls us to do," said Brigadier-General Bill Fox, an experienced surgeon who worked in a field hospital during the Gulf War and who now commands the 44th Medical Brigade, the only airborne medical brigade in the US army.

General Fox led his troops over the weekend in parachute jumps from an air force cargo jet just 250m from the ground.

"This is just training, another day at Fort Bragg for us," said General Fox, adding that the jump had been scheduled before the terror attacks.

While the general and other army commanders say little about their plans, the coming conflict is hard to ignore.

Security at Fort Bragg and nearby Pope Air Force Base has been unusually tight since US military forces were placed on alert in the wake of the terror attacks.

Armed guards staff internal checkpoints and study the identification of everyone who tries to pass. Concrete barriers and barbed wire block entries and roads through the base's miles of pine forests, which are normally open.

Few details have emerged about the role troops here would play in plans to strike back against those who planned the terror attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, and those who support them.

On Thursday, a contingent of special operations soldiers were ordered to an undisclosed location, army officials said. They would not provide any further details.

Meanwhile, the soldiers who stayed behind practise their skills, tend to housekeeping matters, such as laundering their uniforms, and wait.

Among them are veterans of past conflicts, such as Staff Sergeant Sherri Cherry, a public affairs officer who served in the Gulf War, Somalia and Bosnia.

Sergeant Cherry's checklist of things to do includes preparing her two daughters - aged six and two - to stay with relatives, since both she and her husband, Chief Warrant Officer Aundrey Cherry, are soldiers and are likely to be deployed together, as they were in Bosnia.

The army requires soldiers married to other soldiers to make arrangements for the care of their children in the event both are deployed.

Despatchers recall the day fire colleagues' radios went dead

TOM HAYS of Associated Press in New York

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Solemn day: Conor Antoniou, the nephew of fallen firefighter Captain Hatton, holds his uncle's hat as his coffin arrives at St Patrick's. Agence France-Presse photo

When the emergency calls began flooding in from the upper reaches of the World Trade Centre, despatcher Monsitah Corney did what she was trained to do: tell callers to wait for help.

Moments later, a tower collapsed, the calls stopped and Ms Corney wondered what she had done.

''I felt guilt when the building came down,'' she said. ''I felt very bad because I told them to stay there. I had no idea they weren't going to get out never, in my wildest dreams.''

At a news conference, Ms Corney and other New York Fire Department despatchers described their struggle with guilt and grief over the life-and-death decisions they made on September 11 from a command bunker in Central Park.

Among their fears: that they sent firefighters to their death.

''A lot of us feel remorse about sending them in,'' said despatcher John Lightsey, his eyes red.

The despatchers spoke to reporters in response to broadcasts of unofficial tapes of radio transmissions from the morning of the attacks. The tapes captured the despatchers' frantic attempts to locate trapped victims and get them help, sometimes too late.

Even when the first jet hit, the despatchers thought the emergency was manageable, Cheryl Phillips said.

Ms Corney's duty was to field emergency calls from people trapped in the building. ''There were some of them who wanted to run for their lives,'' she said.

Not knowing the towers were in danger of collapse, Ms Corney told the callers that trying to flee through smoke-choked hallways in a high-rise building was too dangerous. Instead, they should wait for firefighters, she said.

An ''executive type'' kept calling back demanding instructions on ''how to handle this''.

''Finally I told him, `Look, the best thing to do is to not talk so much and conserve your air','' she said. ''We'll get to you.''

The despatchers tried to focus on the steady stream of voices from firefighters' searching for victims, as well as those of victims pleading for help. Some firefighters radioed that they were trapped under the rubble. Mr Lightsey helped direct units to fire Captain Alfredo Fuentes, who was pulled out alive.

He fielded another call from an emergency worker, whose fate is unknown, who was caught under a fallen pedestrian bridge.

''I don't have much air,'' the voice said. ''Please send somebody.''

But the most enduring memory, the despatchers said, was what followed the towers' collapse: a deafening silence.

When the lines went dead, the despatchers desperately radioed for firefighters' locations.

''You call and no one answers you,'' said Brian O'Hara, who staffed a mobile command centre near the disaster site. ''I've been on the job a long time and I've never had that situation where you can't contact anybody. Somebody always answers.''

Three weeks later, the despatchers are still haunted by the voices and the silence.

Ms Corney said her doctor eased her sorrow over the victims by telling her, ''Perhaps we were of comfort to them''.

Despite his pain over putting firefighters in harm's way, Mr Lightsey knows he could not have kept them away.

''You're not going to stop a firefighter from going into a building,'' he said. ''You're not going to stop them from saving people ... That's what they do.''

Saturday, October 13, 2001

US says Anthrax found at Kazakhstan facility

Updated at 2.41pm:

American inspectors found anthrax spores inside piping at a Soviet-era biological weapons facility in Kazakhstan during a routine inspection this week, a US official said overnight (HK time).

But the Kazakh Embassy issued a statement strongly emphasising that the discovery was entirely unrelated to anthrax scares in the United States and linked to efforts to dismantle what was the world's biggest anthrax production site in Soviet times.

''It was a routine inspection under the joint threat reduction programme. None of them contracted the disease. They are taking their medicine,'' said the US official, who asked not to be identified, referring to the inspectors.

The inspectors, working under government agreements meant to decrease the threat of proliferation of biological weapons, carry out their work fully protected so they are not in any danger, he said.

Four cases of anthrax, apparently spread deliberately, have been established in New York and Florida in the last week, raising concerns of possible use of biological weapons as the United States pursues its war on terrorism. Nevada's governor said overnight a letter was received by a Reno business that tested positive for anthrax on a presumptive basis.

The campaign against terrorism, prompted by the September 11 attacks by hijacked airliners on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon which killed nearly 5,400 people, includes a bombing campaign against Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born militant believed behind the September 11 attacks, is sheltering in Afghanistan. US officials believe bin Laden has been seeking biological and chemical weapons for his fight against America.

In Kazakhstan, the United States has helped fund a threat-reduction programme in the town of Stepnogorsk, and at a bioweapons station on Vozroshdeniye Island in the Aral Sea where the Soviet Union reportedly experimented with anthrax.

Experts fear that some of the anthrax made in former Soviet facilities may have found its way to criminals or extremist groups.

The Kazakh Embassy said the country had been steadfast in its commitment to disarming and deweaponising the weapons of mass destruction and associated facilities it inherited from Soviet days.

''The embassy would like to reiterate that there is no possible linkage between the Kazakhstan facility and recent anthrax cases in the United States of America,'' it added.

It said the project stopped proliferation of biological weapons and pathogens to rogue states or terrorist groups.

''It is a successful example of preventing proliferation at the source and keeping these materials out of the wrong hands,'' the embassy added.

Kazakhstan has been a firm ally in the US efforts to build a coalition against terrorism, feeling the threat from Afghanistan from which it is separated by a thin band of poorer Central Asian states.

A report by the Russian Interfax news agency last summer said that said a dozen people had been treated in hospital with anthrax in Kazakhstan but gave few details.

Meanwhile, a second, more sensitive test on a letter sent from Malaysia to a Microsoft office has come back negative for anthrax, state officials said. A third test was planned for later on Saturday.

No one has tested positive for the disease or become ill, officials said.

State and county health officials interpreted the results differently.

''With our latest test results, it is probably not anthrax,'' said Barbara Hunt, Washoe County district health officer. ''The risk appears to be very low.''

Title: 4,000 Israeli employees absent on day of attack

Source: 4,000 Israeli employees absent on day of attack 2001-09-18 19:37:20 infotimes 18 September 2001

Arab diplomatic sources have revealed to the Jordanian al-Watan newspaper that 4000 Israelis remained absent from their jobs at the twin towers of the World Trade Centre [Tuesday, September 11, 2001] based on intelligence from the Israeli General Security Apparatus, the Shabak.

The fact has evoked suspicion on the part of American officials who want to know how the Israeli government learned about the incident before it occurred, and the reasons why it refrained from informing the U.S. authorities of the intelligence it had.

Suspicions were further increased after Israeli newspaper Yadiot Ahranot revealed that Shabak prevented Israeli premier Ariel Sharon from traveling to New York and particularly to the city's eastern coast to participate in a festival organized by Zionist organizations.

Commentator Aharon Bernie added that Sharon, who was delighted that his speech would get top billing at the festival, asked the head of the organization to mediate and convince the Shabak to change its position, but his attempts were in vain. The terrorist attacks occurred just one day after Sharon's secretary officially announced that he would not participate.

Israel’s Ha'aretz newspaper revealed that the FBI arrested five Israelis four hours after the attack on the [World Trade Center] Twin Towers as they filmed the smoking skyline from the roof of their company building. The FBI arrested the five for "puzzling behavior". They are said to have been caught videotaping the disaster giving out cries of joy and mockery.