Rense.com
FBI Does Not Rule Out
Shootdown Of Hijacked
757 Over Pennsylvania
| SHANKSVILLE, Pa. (Reuters) -
Federal investigators said on Thursday they could not rule out the possibility
that a United Airlines jetliner that crashed in rural western Pennsylvania
during this week's attacks on New York and the Pentagon was shot down. ``We have not ruled out that,'' FBI agent Bill Crowley told a news conference when asked about reports that a U.S. fighter jet may have fired on the hijacked Boeing 757. ``We haven't ruled out anything yet.'' ``It's kind of a loaded question. We're basically at the infancy (of the investigation),'' Crowley added. ``We haven't certainly come to that conclusion either.'' The Defense Department on Tuesday vigorously denied reports suggesting the U.S. military could have downed the hijacked flight in an effort to prevent it from reaching a target, perhaps in Washington. United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed with 45 people on board, had been en route to San Francisco from Newark, New Jersey, when it veered off course over northeastern Ohio and headed back southeast toward Pittsburgh. It crashed 80 miles southeast of that city. Pennsylvania state police officials said on Thursday debris from the plane had been found up to 8 miles away in a residential community where local media have quoted residents as speaking of a second plane in the area and burning debris falling from the sky. Crowley said authorities have not yet found the plane's crucial voice and flight data recorders, but that teams were still searching. ``We've not located the black box,'' he said. ''We're confident and we will keep working on it.'' The wooded crash scene was likely to provide investigators of Tuesday's deadly airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with their best chance of recovering working data recorders. The data recorders could provide an invaluable account of what occurred in the plane's cockpit after the flight turned southeast on Tuesday morning. Flight 93, which crashed near a strip mine, was the only one of four hijacked aircraft not to hit a U.S. landmark. Federal officials believe hijackers planned to crash the plane into the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland or a target in Washington. But passengers who managed to call out on cellular phones and on-board airphones suggested they were about to thwart any such plan. ``I know we're all going to die -- there's three of us who are going to do something about it,'' passenger Thomas Burnett told his wife Deena just before the crash, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. ``He then said, 'I love you, honey,' and that was the end of conversation,'' the Burnett family's priest, Rev. Frank Colacicco, told the newspaper. The National Transportation Safety Board was expected to conduct a flyover of the scene to verify the full extent of the debris field, which was sealed off to outsiders and the media by an army of Pennsylvania state troopers. UAL Corp |
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