Crews Find Large Parts of Fuselage, More Bodies

Recovery crews searching for victims and wreckage of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 pulled six bodies from the calm waters of the Atlantic Ocean on Monday after discovering large and apparently important pieces of the jumbo jet.

“I would characterize it as a major find because we’re starting to find significant parts of the fuselage,” said Robert T. Francis II, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Officials hope that Navy teams will be able to lift the wreckage out of the water today, as investigators try to determine whether the Boeing 747, which plummeted in flames half an hour after taking off for Paris Wednesday night, was brought down by a bomb, a missile or human or mechanical failure.

With the latest discovery, “we think we’ll know the answer sooner rather than later,” said the chief FBI investigator, James K. Kallstrom.

The bodies were retrieved under a 30-by-60-feet piece of fuselage at a depth of 104 feet, just as members of the 230 victims’ families gathered for a memorial service under leaden skies on Fire Island--as close as they could get on land to the spot where Flight 800 plunged into the ocean nine miles offshore.

Afterward, many of those at the service waded into the gentle surf and, one by one, tossed roses into the water.

With searchers aided by calm seas after several days of stiff breezes and whitecaps, these developments were reported:

* Preliminary field tests on the wreckage have found what investigators consider suspicious residue, which was being sent to Washington for further study at a government laboratory, government sources said. But law enforcement officials said it was “premature and irresponsible” to conclude that the residue proves the crash was the result of deliberate sabotage or terrorism.

“There is residue, but we’re not certain of what it is. Field tests have been wrong in the past. Some of it could still be from an engine fire or from mechanical maintenance processing,” a well-placed law enforcement official said.

* While official sources declined to speculate on the cause of the crash, others continued to focus on the possibility that a missile was involved. A former Israeli Air Force expert in missile technology said that eyewitness reports fit descriptions of such an attack. He questioned whether the plane, at 13,700 feet, was indeed out of range for shoulder-fired missiles, as some experts have said, when it burst into flames.

Kallstrom refused to speculate whether a bomb or missile scenario may eventually turn out to be correct. But he said that among the thousands of interviews conducted by agents so far, about 75 to 100 have produced “credible” results from eyewitnesses.

“It’s significant information from the standpoint of a starting-off point if we do go to one of those scenarios” of terrorism, he said.

* U.S. counter-terrorism officials received a threat Monday against Americans from a clandestine Saudi group calling itself the Movement for Islamic Renewal on the Arabian Peninsula. It warned of an imminent “fourth attack” after the successful strikes against two U.S. military installations in Saudi Arabia and the TWA crash. But U.S. officials characterized the communique as part of “a stream of threats” and said they had no reason to believe the group was behind the attacks in Saudi Arabia or the TWA crash.

The discovery of the debris and the bodies was the first break that investigators have gotten since Thursday. They had grown increasingly pessimistic, suggesting that it could be after the end of the week before they could begin recovering significant parts of the airplane.

Making Progress

“This is a big step forward,” said Kallstrom, the assistant FBI director in charge of the bureau’s investigation. The FBI and the NTSB have divided responsibilities, with the law enforcement agency looking for evidence of a crime and the safety panel looking into aviation issues.

Searchers running sonar through seas as deep as 140 feet located the wreckage and the bodies about 1 p.m. EDT, after first mapping the area of highest probability and discovering two small debris fields.

Picking the most likely targets, they dispatched a team of U.S. Navy and New York Police Department divers who used hand-held sonar and “very sophisticated navigation systems to locate the fuselage structure where the bodies were found,” said Navy Capt. Raymond McCord, a salvage and diving expert.

Francis said that experts hoped additional bodies would be found in this area of wreckage on the continental shelf.

He said that divers dispatched for the first time to explore the “fairly dense concentration of wreckage” about 200 yards long and pull bodies out of it had been hampered by visibility that is limited by the silt they are stirring up from the smooth ocean bottom and by the depth, which filters out sunlight.

“Visibility is a major issue,” he said.

Francis said the water temperature was 52 degrees and the visibility was no more than 20 feet when the area was undisturbed by divers.

The wreckage and bodies were located in the same area in which authorities had reported finding one body Sunday and in which searchers had seen a sheen of oil floating to the surface, suggesting aviation fuel or oil from fuel tanks or engines. However, they said Monday, the remains found Sunday belonged to a body that had been partly retrieved shortly after the crash.

Those remains were found near the center of what is believed to be the crash site, in an area searched 10 times before, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Jim McPherson said. As a result, the Coast Guard, responsible for retrieving anything on the surface, directed its four cutters operating off Long Island, 25 smaller boats and seven aircraft to focus on that section of ocean.

“We believe we are searching in the right area,” he said.

Bodies Recovered

Workers have recovered 106 bodies. Of those, 64 have been positively identified and 56 families have been notified, Kallstrom said. Two additional passengers from California were identified: Marietta and Candace Silverman, both of Los Angeles.

Officials in the Suffolk County, N.Y., medical examiner’s office and FBI investigators said that many of the bodies already recovered were victims in the first-class seats and other sections at the front of the airplane.

Kallstrom, the FBI chief, and Charles Wetli, the medical examiner, said the bodies of victims seated near the plane’s engines and cargo hold could provide the best clues to what occurred aboard the airplane, if the crash was caused by an engine failure or by a bomb stashed in luggage or placed by some other means in the cargo hold.

Wetli said that most of those identified were U.S. citizens and that the process of identifying foreigners aboard the aircraft is taking longer.

“Medical records are being reviewed and compared with autopsy findings for identification,” he said. “We are in the process of locating French, Italian, Swiss and Norwegian doctors to assist in this process.”

In addition, he said, anthropologists are standing by to examine bodies or body parts that are severely decomposed. And, he said, arrangements are being made “for the possible use of DNA technology” to identify some individual body parts.

The medical examiner said that although bodies in water will decompose, the relatively cool temperatures on the ocean floor could slow the process and help preserve them for identification and for investigators seeking clues to the cause of the crash.

Once bodies and body parts are found and brought out of the water, he said, the oxygen in the air will cause them to deteriorate rapidly. But, he said, officials and recovery workers will immediately photograph and videotape remains.

Francis and others have said that retrieval of the bodies is the top priority of the more than 500 Coast Guard personnel and others combing a grid of sea roughly 50 miles by 70 miles, and that retrieval of such wreckage as the four engines and cargo structures remains secondary.

“We’re concentrating on people. We’re not concentrating on aluminum,” he said.

But the wreckage is crucial.

Kallstrom said that after Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, a bomb part the size of a human fingernail turned out to be crucial evidence.

But that airplane, also a Boeing 747, fell on land, allowing investigators immediate access to the bomb debris. In this case, tiny pieces of evidence could be drifting farther out to sea and could become forever lost to criminal investigators.

“That’s why I want that wreckage [that’s] down there,” Kallstrom said. “That’s where my evidence is.”

The difficulty of the search cannot be overestimated. Nor can the need to gain speedy access to potential evidence, because the water can cause it to rust and can erase any telltale burn patterns.

Sources close to the investigation, meanwhile, said the air traffic control radar that had tracked Flight 800 did not provide a precise location of where it went off the radar screen. And the trajectory that it followed as it fell into the ocean can only be estimated.

A Difficult Search

Thus, when authorities began their search, they were not nearly as certain about where it went down as outsiders had presumed.

A police boat sonar, which sends out sound waves that map the sea bottom and objects sitting there, found something that looked like a 15-foot piece of wreckage several days ago. But the crew lacked precise navigating equipment and was unable to note its exact location. Relocating the debris has proven difficult.

Once material is recovered, it must be analyzed before investigators can hope to determine the cause of the crash--even as the public, politicians, families of the victims and the media pressure investigators to come up with answers.

The area where the wreckage is believed to have fallen is well charted. There are hundreds of wrecks at the bottom of the sea off Long Island, some dating back almost 400 years. But much of the sandy bottom is smooth, and there are few topographic protrusions that would confuse sonar signals.

The currents there run slowly, no more than half a mile an hour, and they tend to fluctuate toward shore and away, making it unlikely that larger pieces of debris would be carried far, although a major storm could stir up undersea drift.

The residue that was subjected to initial tests could be considered no more than suspicious--and far from conclusive--because forensic fieldwork is able to conduct only limited tests for a limited number of compounds. More sophisticated lab work is required to pinpoint or confirm what left the residue on the airplane parts.

The forensic work on the few parts available to investigators is going almost as slowly as the time-consuming process of identifying the bodies, because each facet of each fragment must be analyzed, U.S. counter-terrorism officials said.

Many of the pieces are so small that investigators cannot be certain where they came from until they reassemble the aircraft, a process underway at a hangar in Caliverton on Long Island. With so much of the wreckage still unrecovered, that process could take weeks.

Meanwhile, the group whose threat surfaced Monday--its wording indicated that it was dispatched Thursday--said in a 20-line statement obtained by The Times: ‘We carried out our promise with the plane attack of yesterday. You will hear of the fourth event very soon.”

Its angry language condemned Americans as “disbelievers” and “sons of destruction” who have usurped Saudi assets and protected corrupt Saudi rule. It called for jihad, or holy war, against American interests, calling for a boycott of American products and “destroying their interests anywhere in the world.”

A group with a similar name, the Movement for Islamic Change--Jihad Wing on the Arabian Peninsula, originally faxed a warning to al-Hayat newspaper on the eve of the Flight 800 explosion threatening American interests. It also claimed responsibility for the November 1995 bombing of a U.S. military headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five Americans.

“It’s a piece of a stream of threats, but we do not have any reason at this stage to believe that this is the group behind any of these attacks,” a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said.

Others said the communiques bear the marks of after-the-fact claims that are common in terrorism and sabotage and which seek to exploit the fear engendered by attacks.

Indeed, the Saudi groups claiming responsibility for the 1995 attack in Riyadh and the attack last month at a Dhahran air base that killed 19 Americans would be at the bottom of a list of suspects in the TWA explosion--if it is found to be an act of sabotage, counter-terrorism officials said. So far there is nothing beyond the communiques to indicate that the two Saudi attacks might be connected to the TWA crash.

*

Malnic reported from Long Island, N.Y., and Wright from Washington. Times staff writers Richard A. Serrano on Long Island, Marlene Cimons in Washington and John J. Goldman and James Gerstenzang in New York contributed to this story.

* A FORMIDABLE TASK

Recovering jet wreckage is a time-consuming and delicate job, experts say. A13

* RELATED STORIES, PHOTOS: A12, A13