Unraveling the String

EAST MORICHES, N.Y.: A trail of battered luggage, debris and clothing littering the sea floor provides new evidence that TWA flight 800 was brought down by a bomb hidden in the forward cargo hold. The discovery that the luggage and other debris lie farther back along the 747's flight path than the recently recovered cockpit is consistent with a theory that a bomb blew the cargo hold open, scattering suitcases and parts of the plane into the ocean before the rest of the plane exploded and crashed farther downrange. Since only a small percentage of the aircraft has been recovered, the FBI and the NTSB do not have enough forensic evidence to make a clear statement on what caused the crash, and still have not ruled out mechanical failure as a possibility. Still, says TIME's Elaine Rivera, this evidence could provide important clues. "Investigators believe that anything which fell off the 747 first will end up providing more clues about the explosion and the crash." Workers are beginning to pick through the 1-ton remnants of the cockpit The team will have to pull the twisted metal and wires apart to make any sense of the debris, which James Kallstrom of the FBI compared to "a big ball of string." As the investigation goes on, reconstruction of the incident will have to continue without any more information from the black box flight recorders, which haven't provided many answers about the crash. "We're kind of at the end" with the tapes, confessed NTSB Vice Chairman Robert Francis. about $77,000 so far otherwise the mother would have chosen to abort both fetuses," reports TIME's Helen Gibson. "People imagine a "Sophie's Choice" scenario with one fetus singled out, but the doctor probably selected whichever fetus was least likely to complicate the pregnancy," says TIME's Christine Gorman. "Technically, aborting just one is more difficult, and carries with it the risk of spontaneously aborting the other fetus." Whether the other survived the operation is still unknown. the federation is a cornerstone of the Dayton agreements." a tactic directly from the Helms-Burton playbook Scot Woods