FBI Tip Line Callers Put Names to Faces in Olympic Photos in 1 Day

Less than 24 hours after appealing for help from the public, the FBI identified seven of nine people in photos taken at Centennial Olympic Park minutes before last summer’s bombing.

“We’ve had an enormous response,” FBI spokesman Jay Spadafore said Friday. “We’re very gratified.”

The FBI on Thursday released dark and blurry photographs of eight people and an artist’s sketch of one man, saying it wanted to talk to them as possible witnesses to the July 27 bombing that killed one person and injured more than 100.

By Friday, just two of the people remained unidentified: the man in the sketch and a man seen in a fuzzy photographic silhouette wearing a long shirt or smock and carrying a backpack.

Meanwhile, a woman who said she, her husband and daughter were pictured in one FBI photo has turned over a videotape she took minutes before the bombing. The tape appears to show two guards searching under a bench before the explosion. The bomb had been placed in a knapsack under a bench.

Sara Anderson of suburban Woodstock said she recognized herself and her family in a blurry color photo of three people sitting on the ground near where the bomb exploded.

Callers to a tip line also identified three men photographed walking near the blast site and a man videotaped while apparently wearing a military-style backpack.