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Posted on 09/24/2001 10:09:19 PM PDT by kattracks

The cockpit voice recorder from hijacked United Flight 93 shows that a Middle Eastern man posing as a pilot had already gained access to the cockpit and was sitting in the jumpseat when the plane left Newark airport on Tuesday, Sept. 11 -- a development that may have been duplicated on a dozen other flights that day.

"Investigators believe that on at least one flight, one of the hijackers was already inside the cockpit before takeoff," reported Fox News Channel's Rita Cosby late Monday, in a story not covered on FNC's website.

The cockpit voice recordings indictate that Flight 93's pilots believed their guest was a colleague, "and was thereby extended the typical airline courtesy of allowing any pilot from any airline to join a flight by sitting in the jumpseat, the folded over extra seat located inside the cockpit," Cosby said.

After interviewing pilots on other flights that were grounded that day, probers now believe that "about a dozen Middle Eastern men on numerous flights sitting in the jumpseats." The suspicious cockpit visitors have not yet been identified.

But those accounts have authorities now theorizing that up to a dozen other kamikaze attacks on U.S. landmarks were in the works that day.

Flight 93 slammed into a hillside in rural Pennsylvania after passengers attacked hijackers who had turned the plane toward Washington, D.C. while it was over Ohio.

"There have been reports of stolen airline uniforms and stolen cockpit keys from various airlines since 1994," Cosby said.

Boeing, the manufactirer of the hijacked aircraft, says all of its cockpit keys are identical and therefore interchangeable.

Witnesses in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center have told probers that Osama bin Laden had a plan in the mid-1990's to hijack a dozen aircraft and destroy them simultaneously all over the world.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

War on Terrorism

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