By September 28 the crisis task force in Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had received 349 requests to spot the kith and kin who might have been in the epicenter of September 11 anti-US terrorist acts, the ministry’s acting spokesman Serhiy Borodenkov told The Day. He said that 169 persons had already been traced. Still unknown is the fate of two Ukrainian citizens, one of which was employed at the World Trade Center and the other was applying for a job there precisely when the hijacked planes crashed into the skyscrapers. According to Mr. Borodenkov, the Ukrainian Embassy in Pakistan is still functioning. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced earlier that some Ukrainian diplomats, as well as their wives and children, left Islamabad for fear of possible contingencies.
Meanwhile, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has announced for the first time that some of the 19 suspects in the September 11 terrorist strikes were associated with Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaida organization. The FBI has also released photos of the suspects and simultaneously admitted it had no reliable information about these persons and called on the public to identify those in the photos. Meanwhile, the US continues its largest deployment of armed forces over the past ten years and has called up over 16,300 reservists. Yet, the American president has allayed suspicions that the US is going to resort to military actions in the immediate future. So far Washington is prepared to use other available levers, financial and diplomatic, to force the Afghan Taleban to surrender Osama Bin Laden, the prime suspect in America’s Bloody Tuesday. “We will use the might of the United States,” George Bush emphasized during a visit to Chicago.
