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"We have seen no evidence of anything other than an accident here," said Ted Lopatkiewicz, spokesman for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board."There has been no evidence found, from what I can tell -- at least that's been relayed to us -- that there was any criminality involved here. It appears, at least the evidence we have, is that a vertical fin came off, not that there was any kind of event in the cabin."

I don't know about the rest of you folks but such a confident, NOT, statement coming from the governmental body charged with invetigating this event puts any rumors of sabotage to rest in my mind.

/sacoff

I hate to puncture anyone's tinfoil hat or underwear, but the basic damage to the airplane was that the vertical stabilizer came off. To do that with explosives would have required access to the internal structure. You could do it in flight, but not during takeoff. It wouldn't be easy or unnoticed either. I suppose that some sort of blast path from the passenger cabin up through the overhead to the attachment structure might have been available, but that might have scattered evidence of explosives over a wide area.

NAMSMAN sends.

Saturday Nov. 2001; 11:39 a.m. EST
Flt. 587 Video Shows 'Puff of Smoke' in Sky

A second-by-second videotape of the final moments of doomed American Airlines Flight 587 shows a puff of smoke in the sky seconds after it crashed outside of New York's JFK Airport Monday, lending credence to eyewitnesses who say the jetliner exploded before slamming into a Rockaway, New York neighborhood.

Though Flt. 587 probers have not released the key videotape, shot from a Metropolitan Transportation Authority highway surveillance camera, reporters from New York's Daily News were allowed to view it Friday.

"The tape.... shows a white outline of the jetliner against a clear sky in fairly steep decline," the News reported in Saturday editions. "Seconds later, the outline disappears and the video shows a blurry, white, undefined patch as the plane apparently breaks apart."

Visible in one of the final frames of the sequential videotape, "a puff of white smoke in the sky."

The images of Flt. 587's final moments are said to be "very unclear." FBI and NTSB investigators hope to learn more through video enhancement techniques.

"We have seen NO EVIDENCE of anything other than an accident here..." Move along citizen !