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Attack on the Cole in briefCompiled from Times wires, published October 15, 2000 Team looking into explosion growsADEN, Yemen -- Dozens of investigators descended on this port city Saturday to determine whether it was terrorists who attacked the USS Cole as it sat in a Yemeni harbor. Lt. Terrence Dudley, a U.S. Navy spokesman in Aden, said 40 FBI agents and Department of Defense specialists from Washington's Foreign Emergency Support Team arrived in the city Saturday, joining a few experts already in place. Their mission: "advise, assist and assess" a probe that began almost immediately after Thursday's explosion, Dudley said. So far, investigators have worked to secure what U.S. officials increasingly believe is a terrorist crime scene. Divers were examining the hull. More than 100 FBI evidence and explosives experts, including those in the group that arrived Saturday, were expected in Aden by the end of the weekend. Yemen almost immediately rejected U.S. claims that terrorism was behind Thursday's explosion, and the Foreign Ministry repeated Saturday that it "does not accept the presence of terrorists on its territories." Nonetheless, U.S. officials think it was suicide bombers who blew up a small boat next to the 8,600-ton destroyer, ripping a 40-by-40-foot hole at the water line. Remains of five sailors return to United StatesDOVER, Del. -- The bodies of five of the sailors killed in the attack on the Cole arrived back on U.S. soil on Saturday. After their caskets were blessed by a base chaplain, the five bodies were carried off the C-17 transport plane by pall bearers who quietly marched between two rows of saluting honor guard to waiting hearses, said Maj. Frank Smolinsky, a spokesman for Dover Air Force Base. "It was done with quiet pomp and circumstance and an appropriate amount of respect and dignity for these young men and women," Smolinsky said. "These incidents in the gulf bring back the fact that what we do is dangerous." At Dover, site of the military's largest mortuary, the remains were to be prepared for return to their families. The Navy's personnel chief, Vice Admiral Norb Ryan Jr., its top enlisted member, Master Chief Petty Officer James Herdt, and Delaware Gov. Thomas R. Carper were among the more than 200 people who attended the private ceremony, Smolinsky said. Seagoing flatbed to bring COLE back to home portNORFOLK, Va. -- The USS COLE will be carried back to the United States on the deck of a "heavy lift" vessel, the commander of the Atlantic Fleet said Saturday. The commercial vessel BLUE MARLIN, which has a large open deck like an oceangoing flatbed truck, was on its way to the COLE, Adm. Robert Natter said. The BLUE MARLIN will hoist the damaged 505-foot destroyer out of the water for the return trip. The COLE's crew members will remain on board until the ship is lifted, then most will disembark and be flown home, Natter said. A handful will remain on board and care for the COLE as it is carried back to Norfolk. Natter couldn't say when the BLUE MARLIN would arrive or when the COLE would return, but he said the destroyer might not make it back to its home port for weeks. Flooding in the ship has been contained and the ship has electricity, Natter said. Surviving crew members on the COLE were given cellular phones and credit cards to communicate with their families, he said. They also were given access to e-mail on two other Navy ships. Bittersweet ceremonyEarlier Saturday, Natter was joined by Sens. John Warner and Chuck Robb of Virginia to dedicate the Navy's homecoming statue at a downtown park, part of Fleet Week activities in Norfolk. The statue, a replica of one at the Navy memorial in Washington, D.C., depicts a sailor being greeted by his loved ones. "Not all homecomings are happy," Norfolk Mayor Mayor Paul Fraim said of the casualties from the COLE. "We still live in a dangerous world."
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
