Final phone call: hijackers have knives and cutters

10.55 am

WASHINGTON - The hijackers who crashed an American Airlines aircraft into the Pentagon just before 1 am (NZ time) today as part of a co-ordinated attack on the United States, brandished knives and cardboard cutters to take over the aircraft.

The information was revealed during two telephone calls that Barbara Olson, wife of US Solicitor General Ted Olson, made from aboard the aircraft before the crash.

Apparently the hijackers were not carrying firearms.

Barbara Olson, who was also a commentator for CNN, was one of the 64 people who died in the crash of American Airlines flight 77.

A total of 266 people were reported to have died in four co-ordinated air crashes across the United States northeast.

Olson made two calls to inform her husband that the airplane, believed to be flying from Washington's Dulles Airport to Los Angeles, had been hijacked.

She told him that the hijackers, armed with knives and cardboard cutters, herded the passengers and crew, including the pilot, toward the back of the plane.

Ted Olson was said by CNN to have immediately called the command centre at the Justice Department to inform them of the hijacking. The Department, unaware of the developments, told Olson they would investigate.

Olson told her husband that there was more than one hijacker, but made no additional comments.

"What should I tell the pilots to do?" CNN reported Olson as asking her husband.

The airliner crashed into the Pentagon, just outside Washington, DC., this morning, setting the nerve center of US defense on fire and gutting a large portion of the structure.

This was one of four air crashes involved in the attack, compared by many to the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor during World War II, which spread terror across New York City and the nation's capital.

Around 9:00 a.m. 1 am (NZ time), two airliners were flown into the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, at the very heart of New York City's financial district, opening a large gash toward the top of the 110-story towers.

Only minutes later, the co-ordinated attack continued, when the commercial jet Olson was aboard was crashed on the Pentagon. A fourth jet went down in western Pennsylvania.

No death toll was immediately available but officials feared the number could run into the thousands, as 40,000 people worked in the Trade Center.

One passenger on the aircraft that crashed outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, locked himself in one of the plane's bathrooms and called 911 from his cell phone to report the hijacking.

President George W. Bush set off from the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command outside of Omaha, Nebraska to return to Washington on Tuesday afternoon, while the Federal Aviation Administration for the first time in history ordered all airplanes across to country grounded until at least noon EDT on Wednesday (4 am Thursday NZ time).

- REUTERS

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