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Wednesday,
November 14, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
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Mechanical failure likely cause of crash
Crash makes New Yorkers huddle together again
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Taliban officials leave embassy in Pakistan
The rise and fall of Taliban US missile puts Al-Jazeera out of action
Hasina faces graft case Typhoon claims 20 lives in Vietnam
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Mechanical failure likely cause of crash New York, November 13 American Flight 587, an Airbus A300 bound for Santo Domingo, slammed into a residential area, destroying homes, and igniting new fear in a city traumatised by September’s terror attacks. Six persons on the ground were reported missing. Speculation immediately centred on a possible new terror attack. The city authorities ordered a huge security alert, as military jets flew air cover and city bridges, tunnels and airports were closed. But the National Transportation Safety Board said early signs pointed to a catastrophic mechanical failure on board the plane because the engine appeared to fall off and because the crash happened so early in flight. Investigators have already recovered the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and planned to have it analysed by experts in
Washington. By last night, searchers had recovered 265 “relatively intact bodies,” CNN quoted the police as saying. Thick black smoke belched into the air after the plane hit, spoiling the brilliant clear morning. Shards of burning wreckage littered tree-lined residential streets, while fire consumed houses bathed in aviation fuel. The tail section of the plane was later pulled from the nearby Jamaica Bay. Twelve houses were hit, including four which were destroyed, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said. One was damaged when an engine of the doomed plane, almost intact, sliced into it. Other wreckage just missed a gas station. Eyewitness reports suggested an engine had tumbled from the plane before it crashed. The White House said there were “no unusual communications” between the twin-engine jet and air traffic controllers before the crash. New York Governor George Pataki said the pilot had dumped fuel before the disaster, but later said reports to that effect were inconclusive. In Santo Domingo, 500 anguished relatives of passengers on the plane waited for information. Dominican President Hipolito Mejia lamented “any event that results in the loss of a single human life” and the authorities declared three days of mourning. Many of the dead were thought to be Dominicans returning home. Flight 587 left Kennedy at 9.14 a.m., and radio contact was lost three minutes later, FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto said. The aircraft, a French-made, Airbus A300-600 with the capacity to hold 266 passengers, was delivered new to the American Airlines in July 1988, and was powered by two General Electric CF6-80C2A5 turbofan engines, Airbus said in a statement. The aircraft and its engines are generally considered workhorse equipment with few safety problems given their widespread use.
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Crash makes New Yorkers huddle together again Washington, November 13 Exactly two months and a day after the attack on New York’s World Trade Centre
(WTC), Airbus A-300 with 260 persons aboard en route to the Dominican Republic, crashed in the city neighbourhood of Queens, minutes after takeoff from the JFK International Airport on Monday. Airline officials said they had no indication why the plane went down — there were no distress calls. No terror threats coincided with the crash, said a White House spokesman. But just as they did two months ago, New Yorkers huddled around office television sets and lingered in restaurants to listen to the radio for the latest news on the crash. Frantic phone calls, e-mails and Internet instant messages flew between friends and relatives throughout the morning — though most admitted they were sure no one they knew was anywhere near the area when the plane exploded and crashed. The crash came just as many New Yorkers were finally achieving the much-desired sense of normality, a BBC news report said. Restaurants and bars were once again beginning to fill. Many New Yorkers were making an effort to go to Broadway shows or museums. The fear of anthrax attacks had also started to wane. New security procedures had convinced many New Yorkers that they could return to their everyday lives — albeit with caution. On the streets outside New York’s main rail station, crowds were thin. Many seemed hesitant to linger. Many said they were depressed and expressed fears that more jobs would be cut and the crash would further hurt an already beleaguered tourism industry. The report quoted Brendan
Heneghan, who narrowly escaped from his WTC office on September 11, as saying: “It brings back all the memories and triggers the same set of emotions as the attacks two months ago. Just when you think no tragedy will surprise you, you find you can still be shocked.” New York moved into a heightened state of alert minutes after the crash. Bridges and tunnels as well as the three area airports — Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark — were closed. After touring the crash site, outgoing Mayor Rudolph Giuliani sought to bring calm to a city that was gradually limping back to normalcy. “I don’t think people should jump to conclusions. There’s no reason for anyone to change anything they’re going to do in their life right now as a result of this.
IANS |
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Taliban officials leave embassy in Pakistan Islamabad, November 13 At least three vehicles, one of them carrying four officials, left the embassy premises for a destination unknown to approximately 80 journalists gathered at the embassy, most of them waiting for a visa for Afghanistan. Journalists who tried to question the officials were rebuffed. “There is no question of being issued visas,” said a low-ranking official, adding that those who had submitted their passports could collect them from the visa section, which was empty at the time of filing this report. Asked whether Pakistan had asked the embassy staff to leave, an official answered in the negative. Pakistan is the only country to recognise the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and is home to nearly two million Afghan refugees who fled their country in the last two decades following the Soviet invasion in 1979. The officials’ departure comes hours after a Taliban representative told SADA the ruling militia had withdrawn from their positions inside Afghanistan, including capital Kabul, and were scattering themselves in small groups in all the provinces to get ready for the “real” phase of “jehad,” as per the group’s supreme commander Mullah Omar’s instructions. Confirming the closure of the Afghan embassy in Islamabad, government sources told SADA that consulates in the Peshawar and Quetta, Pakistani cities in provinces bordering Afghanistan, were also being shut down. Sources said Afghan diplomats had not yet been asked to leave the country, but there was a probability that they would be told to do so. Earlier Islamabad had shut down the Taliban consulate in the southern port city of Karachi last week. IANS |
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The rise and fall of Taliban Islamabad, November 13 These are the Taliban. Their movement swept out of Pakistani religious schools and to power in war-ravaged Afghanistan in 1996 in a lightning capture of Kabul from the south as their mujahideen, or holy warrior, opponents raced out to the north. Today, the tables turned. The mujahideen fighters who now compose the opposition moved into the city from the north. Taliban tanks, armoured personnel carriers and troops packed into battered Japanese pick-ups streamed out all night toward their powerbase in southern Kandahar. They are now targets of the precision bombs of the world’s most modern air force as the USA punishes the Taliban for harbouring Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the suicide plane attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and sliced through the Pentagon on September 11. The Taliban were fiercely proud of their achievement in imposing on their country a religious-based administration modelled on the utopia of a 1,300-year-old Islamic system after emerging as a force only in 1994 in the southern city Kandahar. But their religious fervour, their insularity, their awkward and inexperienced handling of diplomacy — and the absence of something as basic as television — may have sealed their demise. The Taliban’s spiritual leader is the reclusive Mullah Mohammad Omar, son of a poor Afghan peasant family who has never travelled further than the neighbouring Pakistan and is only known to have met two Westerners in his 44 years. The former guerrilla, who lost an eye fighting the Soviet occupation, banned education for girls so women may not work. Television and photography of any living thing were prohibited because Islam forbids icons. Music — except for acappella religious chants — was also forbidden. Men were forbidden to trim their beards or women to go out in public unless swathed from head to toe. Islamic sharia law was strictly enforced with the hand amputated for theft, and executions carried out in public. The feared religious police, under the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, prowled city streets to force people to attend prayers five times a day and ensured women did not leave their homes without a male blood relative. The economy and infrastructure is in ruins, with the UN estimating that after 23 years of war and the worst drought in three decades up to a quarter of the 24 million population are fully or partly dependent on food aid. The Taliban were harsh and effective. They eradicated cultivation of opium poppies in a land that until two years ago was bathed in a sea of pink and white flowers and whose harvests supplied the vast majority of the world’s heroin. The most prominent casualty of the fall of Kabul was former president Najibullah and his brother who were dragged from the UN compound where they had sheltered for four years, and beaten and hanged from lamp posts in the city centre. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates cut links as it became clear that the Taliban would not hand over Bin Laden. The Taliban’s destruction in March of two ancient giant Buddha figures in the central province of Bamiyan — bombing the magnificent sculptures to smithereens — further alienated international opinion and provoked worldwide outrage. This has had little impact on Mullah Omar, known officially by the Islamic title of Amir al-Momineen or leader of the faithful, in which capacity he is effectively Head of State. He has shown no sign of being ready to surrender Bin Laden. Indeed, he may be unable to do so. The outside world understands little about the relationship between two of the most secretive men on earth. But Mullah Omar became increasingly dependent on Bin Laden not only for financing but to shore up his own rule since Bin Laden took shelter in Omar’s near-pariah state in 1996. They may not have been able to survive without each other. And that symbiosis appears to have sounded the death knell of the Islamic movement that Mullah Omar built from nothing through religious faith into the state that was his ideal.
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US missile puts Al-Jazeera out of action Doha, November 13 “US aircraft bombed the Al-Jazeera offices in Kabul during the night,” the Qatar-based satellite channel announced. Al-Jazeera staff in the capital, which fell to Northern Alliance opposition forces at dawn, had not been wounded, but they could no longer be contacted, according to a news bulletin. The channel gave no details about the extent of the damage, but did say the home of one employee had also been hit.
AFP |
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Nepal princess cremated Kathmandu, November 13 The helicopter with Princess Prekshya, younger sister of Queen Komal, and five other persons went down yesterday into the scenic Rara lake, in the latest tragedy to hit the royal family which lost 10 of its members in a palace massacre in June. Army rescue workers recovered the body of the Princess and found two survivors, but failed to locate three other persons from the Himalayan kingdom’s deepest lake, 550 km from capital Kathmandu. “The search for the remaining three persons is continuing,’’ Birendra Shrestha, an official of the Rescue Coordination Centre at the Kathmandu airport told Reuters. The body of the princess was flown into Kathmandu in a military aircraft late yesterday and cremated on the banks of holy Bagmati river shortly after midnight in accordance with Hindu tradition, an official said. The Nepali government ordered the national flag to fly at half mast on Tuesday to mourn the death of Princess Prekshya. The French-made Ecuriel helicopter belonged to Fishtail Air, which runs helicopter services in the Himalayan kingdom.
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Hasina faces graft case Dhaka, November 13 The bureau of Anti-corruption has already completed primary investigation and the Prime Minister’s Office has authorised it to begin secondary-level investigations against Sheikh Hasina and other ministers, reports United News of Bangladesh. Others include former Food Minister Amir Hossain Amu, former Finance Minister Shah A.M.S. Kibria, former Industries Minister Tofail Ahmed, former Home Minister Mohammad Nasim, former State Minister for Planning Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir, and former State Minister for Energy Rafiqul
Islam. UNI |
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Typhoon claims 20 lives in Vietnam Hanoi, November 13 The typhoon uprooted thousands of trees, destroyed crops and roads and washed away more than 2,600 homes, the Central Flood and Storm Control Committee reported. Torrential rains lashed a 1,000 km stretch of coastline yesterday, damaging another 12,000 homes and forcing the evacuation of 562 households as 240 mm of rain fell on some areas. Hundreds of fishing boats were sunk, and communication severed in several provinces as 130 km per-hour winds downed powerlines.
DPA |
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