Toll may exceed 5,000

By Larry McShane

Associated Press

NEW YORK — The gruesome search through the graveyard of the World Trade Center yielded no survivors as the death toll mounted Thursday, and hopes dimmed for more than the 4,700 missing. President Bush promised to visit New York today to "hug and cry" with its shaken citizens.

Two days after the trade center was hit and destroyed by two hijacked passenger planes, swirling dust kept visibility limited and sanitation trucks waged a losing fight against the residue of the blast.

Tens of thousands of residents still could not return to their homes in closed-off lower Manhattan. Nerves were frayed by bomb scares and false alarms, both in New York and in Washington, D.C.

The city also brought in 30,000 body bags for pieces of human remains.

"Even scary movies do not happen like this," said Enver Kesti, 42, a pizza chef who returned to clean up a gourmet shop that once sat in the towers’ shadows.

A man who tried to use a false pilot’s identification to get past security was arrested Thursday at John F. Kennedy International Airport, and at least five more were detained, police said.

The arrested man had tried to fly to California on Tuesday and was carrying a certificate from a Florida flight training school, according to a source familiar with the workings of the airline industry.

Speaking at a briefing about the World Trade Center disaster, New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said five or six people, some of them Arabs, had been detained Thursday at the city’s airports for questioning by the FBI and the Joint Terrorist Task Force.

Kerik said it was unclear whether the men detained had any connection to Tuesday’s terrorist attacks.

The incidents caused the region’s three major airports — Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark, N.J. — to close again just hours after service was restored.

Bush declared today, the day of his New York visit, a "national day of prayer and remembrance." He asked Americans to spend their lunch breaks taking part in services at their chosen places of worship, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

The president praised New Yorkers for showing "the compassion of America and the bravery of America."

New York was not alone in counting its missing and dead. The Pentagon said 126 people in the building were killed in Tuesday’s plane attack. Seventy bodies had been recovered.

Add the 4,763 missing reported by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, plus the 266 passengers and crew members who died aboard the planes that hit the trade center, the Pentagon and a field southeast of Pittsburgh, and the total dead in Tuesday’s carnage could be more than 5,000.

That would be higher than the death toll from Pearl Harbor and the Titanic combined. A total of 2,390 Americans died at Pearl Harbor nearly 60 years ago, and the sinking of the Titanic claimed 1,500 lives.

Up to 50 people were involved in the attack, the Justice Department said, with at least four hijackers trained at U.S. flight schools. Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden remained a top suspect.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said authorities had "thousands and thousands" of leads. He said they had determined that 18 hijackers were on the planes: groups of five on two planes and groups of four on the others.

In New York, the difficulties of extracting bodies from the rubble meant that while 184 deaths had been confirmed, city officials prepared to watch the total soar. The missing included nearly 400 city firefighters and police officers. Another 2,300 people were injured.

The lone bit of bright news was the recovery of two firefighters who slipped into an underground pocket beneath the rubble while searching for survivors on Thursday. The two radioed for help and were rescued by fellow firefighters several hours after they fell.

At One Liberty Plaza, an office building near the trade center site, volunteers were evacuated when the top 10 stories of the complex appeared unsteady. Workers fled, sprinting down the street.

New Yorkers did take some small steps toward normal life. While everything south of 14th Street remained closed, the northern part of Manhattan became busier. Office buildings reopened, restaurants put out sidewalk tables and hawkers handed out fliers. Traffic on the streets and subways was up sharply compared with Wednesday.

In Washington, the Senate was evacuated because of a bomb scare, and officials disclosed that Vice President Dick Cheney moved to Camp David in what his spokeswoman called "a purely precautionary measure."

New Yorkers also remained edgy. On Staten Island, parents pulled children off school buses after a report that a car possibly linked to the terrorists had driven into the borough. At LaGuardia Airport, passengers were briefly evacuated from the just-reopened facility after a man said something about a device in a bag. Buildings around Manhattan were evacuated as authorities erred on the side of caution.

"Right now, a lot of people are panicking," Kerik said. "And they really have to be as cautious as possible."

Meanwhile, U.S. and Philippine authorities conducted a raid at a hotel in Manila in connection with the terrorist attacks in the United States, President Gloria Arroyo said Friday.

Arroyo, speaking at a Tokyo news conference, said the "joint action" was taken at the Bayview Hotel, which is near the U.S. Embassy in Manila.

Though officials with Arroyo initially said the raid occurred on Friday, they later said that it was carried out Wednesday, the day after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

One senior official said the Philippines was cooperating with the United States in looking for links between the attacks and "suspects" in the hotel.