Terrorism United States

In the photo, sweaty young Mike Kehoe is headed up--all the way up a smoky stairwell in the north tower of the World Trade Center just after 9 a.m. on Sept. 11. Kehoe wasn't aware that someone was taking his photograph at that particular moment. He's a firefighter. His mind was focused on hustling all the way up the tower and evacuating office workers. "Civilians," as he calls them.

The MD-88 passenger jetliner was cruising above 25,000 feet but there was no one at the controls. Preoccupied with protecting the cockpit door while they took turns going to the bathroom, the pilots momentarily forgot the cardinal safety rule that the captain or the co-pilot must be strapped in and in control of the aircraft at all times. The November incident illustrates an emerging safety issue: The focus on aviation security since Sept.

As 19 hijackers made their way along the concourses at three East Coast airports on Sept. 11, bent on executing the deadliest terrorist attack in history, they were subjecting the U.S. aviation security system to its most critical test. At almost every step along the way, the system posed no challenge to the terrorists--not to their ability to purchase tickets, to pass security checkpoints while carrying knives and cutting implements nor to board aircraft.

This is a list of names added to the total of confirmed dead in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. This list, released since April 19, updates accounts that have appeared in The Times each Sunday since Sept. 11. The number of people unaccounted for, according to New York City officials and Associated Press, is now believed to be 128. Vincent Brunton Patrick Byrne Thomas Farino Robert Hamilton Scott Larsen Salvatore P. Lopes Michael Otten Josh Piver Edward Rall Barrington L. Young

FBI and CIA officials were advised in August that as many as 200 terrorists were slipping into this country and planning "a major assault on the United States," a high-ranking law enforcement official said Wednesday. The advisory was passed on by the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. It cautioned that it had picked up indications of a "large-scale target" in the United States and that Americans would be "very vulnerable," the official said. It is not known whether U.S.

The man walks into the bar, shakes hands with his friends, orders a beer. He looks like every other man in the place, but he's different, and everyone knows it. They try not to stare. Seven hours later, the man's friends are gone, but the man is still standing in the same spot at the bar, drinking, talking. No one needs to ask why. The whole town knows the man's son died in the World Trade Center, along with nearly 50 other people who hailed from here. His son boarded the 5:43 a.m.

From Boston to Burbank, federal authorities are intensifying their scrutiny of Islamic American nonprofits as possible sources of funding for Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. In a recent confidential letter to state charity officials, the U.S. Treasury Department sought financial records on eight Islamic American groups, including some of the largest Muslim charities in the United States. The inquiry is the first examination of domestic nonprofits to come to light since U.S.

He was last in the line moving up the ramp into a waiting C-130 at Tan Son Nhut air base--a tall, husky man with an open Midwestern face who was about to step into history. It was March 29, 1973, in Saigon. And Master Sgt. Max Beilke was officially designated as the last American combat soldier to leave Vietnam. He had survived two wars, Korea and Vietnam. Now he was going home to his family in Minnesota.

Prosecutors in the trial of Timothy J. McVeigh presented evidence and testimony Friday that suggested McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols made two large purchases of highly explosive ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the months before the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

The jokey cliche that your waiter also is an actor has acquired an unfunny edge since Sept. 11. The decline in major sectors of New York's economy since the terrorist attacks means that performers, who always struggle for theatrical work, now are scrambling for traditional "survival jobs" as well. Actor Marco Kujovic, for example, lost his waiting job at the Grill Room in the World Financial Center, a popular dining spot that closed after the World Trade Center disaster next door.

Zacarias Moussaoui, the man indicted as a Sept. 11 accomplice, tried to speak with prosecutors about the death penalty and classified information but they refused, the government said Thursday. Prosecutors said they were informed of the request Tuesday by a jail official, an indication that Moussaoui, who wants to represent himself in the case, is already trying to do so. Moussaoui, however, cannot make that decision on his own. U.S.

A defiant Zacarias Moussaoui--the only person charged in the United States with terrorism in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks--told a judge Monday that he wants to represent himself in a trial without a jury, and called for the destruction of America and Jews everywhere. Moussaoui's fiery remarks appeared to surprise even his own court-appointed defense team. They came during what was supposed to be a routine hearing before U.S.

Microbiologists, like nature, abhor a vacuum, and in the absence of an FBI arrest in last fall's anthrax attacks, some of the nation's top scientists are offering their own theories.

Chantyl Peterson bursts through the front door, greets her mother and slings her schoolbooks onto the floor. She's a healthy seventh-grader who loves horseback riding and playing the flute and doesn't mind homework. Nine years ago, she was dying. A New York City firefighter saved her life back then, but not in the usual way. His bone marrow was a perfect match for the little Nevada girl, then 5 and badly needing a transplant.

A patched and battle-ready guided missile destroyer Cole returned to duty with a flag-waving, horn-blasting send-off Friday, a year and a half after a terrorist bombing in Yemen blew a hole in its side and killed 17 sailors. Hundreds of people cheered along the shore as the Cole, gleaming in the sunlight, set off from Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Ingalls Shipyard for its home port in Norfolk, Va. The Cole returns to duty after 14 months of repairs and improvements.

Amid warnings that another terrorist strike might come tucked inside one of the 17,000 cargo containers that enter the United States each day, researchers are scrambling to make the nondescript metal boxes--and their modes of delivery--tamper-proof.

Sheila Marie Ornedo, heavy with child, is due to give birth in February. The Los Angeles nurse is alone this Christmas, preparing for her baby girl's arrival without Ruben, her husband, by her side. Ruben is the one who should be massaging her aching back, as he used to; picking her up from work at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and taking her out to dinner, as he used to. He should be helping to fix up the nursery, as he was going to.

In a major crackdown on a Palestinian terrorist organization in the United States, four reputed members have been indicted on racketeering charges that include the killing of a teen-age daughter of one of them to silence her, conspiring to murder Jews and discussing the possibility of blowing up the Israeli Embassy here. The indictment, unsealed Thursday by a federal grand jury in St. Louis, marked the first legal action against the shadowy Abu Nidal organization here.

The FBI, acting on information from a captured senior aide to Osama bin Laden, warned banks and financial institutions throughout the Northeast on Friday that they face the threat of terrorist attacks.