Bodies recovered at WTC, service planned

NEW YORK, Oct. 22 (UPI) -- The Concorde landed safely in New York Monday, the governor reopened his city office, and families of nine more victims of the World Trade Center attacks will have bodies to bury.

Those nine were pulled from the rubble of the North Tower Sunday, their bodies draped with American flags as they were carried away from Ground Zero for identification.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said a memorial service will be held at "Ground Zero" next Sunday for those who died at the site. The 16-acre site, where more than 5,000 died, has been visited by heads of state and other dignitaries but has remained off limits to most of the victims' families and others. The area is considered a crime scene and a recovery site where fires still burn and access is restricted. But Giuliani said "the time is right now" for families to meet and mourn at the site.

Gov. George Pataki's midtown Manhattan office on the 38th and 39th floors at 633 Third Ave. reopened Monday as scheduled after the likelihood of anthrax was found in an area used by the state police last Wednesday. Anthrax was not found in the governor's Albany, N.Y., office in the Capitol.

The governor, who was not tested for anthrax ended taking five days of Cipro, the antibiotic that fights an anthrax infection. Seventy of the governor's staff also took five days of Cipro as a prophylactic.

"What is happening here is they are trying to frighten us with a very limited and ineffective attack and we can't let that happen," Pataki told CNN. "As we go forward, we should just go about our lives and get back to normal -- go to work, go to baseball games and go to restaurants and have a good time."

Meanwhile, the Majority Leader of the New York State Senate, Joseph Bruno, a Republican from Brunswick, said people should stop worrying about anthrax and get a flu shot.

"I was amazed to learn that 20,000 people a year in this country die from the flu, the common, ordinary flu," Bruno said on WROW-AM in Albany, N.Y. Monday. "So, while people are terrified of anthrax, they ought to be concerned about flu shots."

Giuliani said that several more media offices were environmentally tested for anthrax over the weekend after four people contracted cutaneous anthrax most likely through mail sent to the offices of NBC, ABC, CBS and the New York Post. All four people are being treated and are expected to recover.

Hundreds of anthrax tests have been made at the state's laboratory in Albany, N.Y., but the federal government has sent a 12-member rapid response team to help process the tests more quickly.

Monday's reopening of the 53-story One Liberty Plaza, where Nasdaq and Goldman Sachs had offices and located adjacent to the World Trade Center, has been delayed.

"There were a few things that we weren't totally satisfied with," said Richard Sheirer, director of the city's Office of Emergency Management. "As soon as the agencies are satisfied that the building is ready to open, we'll let it open as quickly as we can."

Drug dealers who thought that they may have gotten a break -- when evidence, including drugs and cash stored in vaults, disappeared in the rubble of the World Trade Center -- aren't so lucky.

Vaults containing millions of dollars worth of powder and crack cocaine, heroin, Ecstasy and other narcotics along with millions in cash have been recovered from the site. The vaults filled a truck.

Many of the buildings surrounding the Twin Towers that collapsed or became structurally unsound housed federal law enforcement agencies. Since Sept. 11, federal agents have guarded the rubble and watched construction workers and firefighters with binoculars as they searched for victims searching for the vaults.

To underscore the theme of recovery, a British Airways Concorde landed at John F. Kennedy International" class="tpstyle">John F. Kennedy International Airport Monday on the supersonic jet's first trans-Atlantic flight since a crash killed 113 people near Paris last year. The flight left Heathrow Airport in London in the morning with 100 passengers on its first completed crossing. British Airways and Air France are scheduled to resume regular trans-Atlantic service on Nov. 9.

According to city officials:

-- 4,415 people have been declared missing by the police;

-- 473 have been declared dead;

-- 422 bodies have been identified;

-- 1,665 death certificates have been applied for;

-- 24,321 truckloads of debris have been removed;

-- 359,299 total WTC debris have been taken away.

(Reporting by Alex Cukan in Albany, N.Y.)