Page 6 • Monday, September 7, 1998
World
— — ■ 1 —— »attalion
Bad weather slows divers’ search
for SwissAir 111 flight recorder
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia (AP) —
Murky, choppy seas hindered divers
looking Sunday for the fuselage and
flight recorders of Swissair Flight 111.
Ashore, worshippers mourned the
229 victims at memorial services; one
minister broke into tears.
Canadian navy and coast guard
ships, as well as police and military
divers, were trying to track down tan
talizing signals and sonar readings
that might lead them to the MD-ll’s
fuselage and flight recorders under
about 190 feet of water.
The diving operation was slowed
by poor visibility at lower depths and
6-foot swells on the surface. But Capt.
Jason Proulx said divers managed to
narrow the search field for the flight
recorder signal to a 75-yard radius.
Proulx said a large object detected
by sonar on the seabed Saturday
turned out to be a rock, not the
plane’s fuselage.
Help for the searchers was on its
way. The USS Grapple, a U.S. Navy
supply ship which helped in the
deep-sea investigation of the TWA
Flight 800 crash in 1996, embarked
Sunday from Philadelphia with a
team of divers and special equipment
for underwater recovery operations.
Those not involved in the salvage
effort have been barred from the en
tire search area. Soldiers searched the
shoreline for debris and human re
mains. Identifying the victims was
expected to take weeks.
On land, victims’ families and resi
dents were still trying to come to grips
with the tragedy. More than 300 fami
ly members have flown to Halifax from
New York, the plane’s starting point,
and Geneva, its intended destination.
“This has been a horrible week”
said the Rev. Richard Walsh, pausing
to choke back tears in his first sermon
of the day at St. Peter’s Anglican
Church. “I’m sorry, I’ll be OK.”
The Swissair plane crashed
Wednesday, 16 minutes after the pi
lots reported smoke in the cockpit
and decided to attempt an emer
gency landing. The plane started to
ward the Halifax airport, but made
two sharp turns as it tried to de
scend and dump fuel.
In Zurich, Switzerland, Swissair
officials said they had reconstructed
the final phase of the flight, based on
information from Canadian investi
gators. They said the plane could not
have made a direct approach to Hal
ifax from where it made the first dis
tress call because it was flying too
high and was too heavy.
The call was made 70 miles out
of Halifax, but the pilots would have
Swissair tragedy
Orvers cartw closer to iindtng the ‘biack
baxos” and continued to search tor other
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needed 130 miles to make a direct
landing, Swissair’s chief pilot, Rain
er Hiltebrand, said. However, he
said attempting to land in Halifax
was still better than trying for
Boston, which the pilots suggested
to controllers.
Swissair said memorial services
for victims would be held Friday in
New York, Geneva and Zurich.
A series of memorial services was
planned over the next several days in
Halifax and surrounding towns.
RESUMES: $40
S U I T : $ 2 I 0
Business as usual
(7.N. inspectors continue to check Iraqs surveillm
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) —
While U.N. arms inspections
have been sharply limited by
Saddam Hussein’s government,
one group of inspectors is still
busy. But they go only where
Iraqi officials expect them to.
These monitors check re
mote-controlled cameras and
sensors at potential weapons-
making sites, making sure noth
ing has been tampered with in
the surveillance program to en
sure Iraq is not renewing
weapons production.
The monitoring crews are re
sponsible for inspecting about
300 sites around the country.
“They are busy,” said Nils Carl-
strom, the inspector chief in Bagh
dad. “There are day inspections,
night inspections, all the time.”
The monitoring goes largely unno
ticed because it involves sites visited
dozens of times before, causing some
to question how much the monitoring
can really do to prevent Iraq from se
cretly resuming arms production.
The monitors’ work con
trasts with the surprise visits to
new sites that are now blocked
by Iraq. The last six or seven
disarmament inspectors who
did that work left Baghdad on
Aug. 8, three days after Iraq an
nounced it was halting cooper
ation with the U.N. Special
Commission in charge of arms
inspections since Iraq’s defeat
in the Persian Gulf War.
Until the commission declares
that Iraq has eliminated its
weapons of mass destruction,
trade and other sanctions im
posed after Iraq’s 1990 invasion
“There is an
illusion of arms
control taking
place. Right now,
we are not doing
meaningful
inspections in
Iraq”
— Scott Ritter
Resigned U.N. inspector
of Kuwait will not be lifted. The
sanctions have hit Iraq hard,
banning regular sales of its eco
nomic mainstay, oil.
Saddam's government has
long maintained it has de
stroyed its weapons systems,
and its refusal to cooperate with
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MORE RESUMES:$40
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