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Tampa Pilot - Bin Laden Sympathies
Police in Florida say the lone 15-year-old pilot who stole a small private plane and crashed it into a high-rise office block was a "troubled" youth who expressed sympathy for Osama bin Laden in an apparent suicide note.
Tampa Police Chief Bennie Holder said the note was found on the body of Charles Bishop, who was the only person killed in Saturday's incident. "I would characterize it as a suicide note," Holder told reporters in Tampa, adding he did not view Bishop's flight as an act of terrorism.
He said Bishop's note clearly stated that he had acted alone without any help from anyone else, and added that authorities saw no evidence he had support from anyone else.
But Holder said that in the note Bishop expressed sympathy for bin Laden, the Saudi-born militant the United States holds responsible for the Sept. 11 airborne assaults on New York and Washington in which 3,000 people were killed. Holder declined to give details of the note, but said that in it, Bishop "expressed support for what happened on 9-11" -- Sept. 11.
"The young man Charles Bishop is best described as a young man who had very few friends and was very much a loner ... a troubled young man," Holder said of the youth. Bishop turned up for a flight lesson at a nearby airport on Saturday afternoon and then took off in a single-engine Cessna 172 without his flight instructor or airport clearance, flying for about 10 minutes before crashing into the 28th floor of the 42-storey Bank of America building in downtown Tampa.
The plane hit at about 5 pm in clear weather about two thirds the way up the Bank of America building, a landmark on the Tampa skyline.
The crash did not cause a fire, but fire officials sprayed the area with foam to prevent aviation fuel from igniting.
The wings and other parts of the aircraft had fallen to the ground, and the plane's fuselage was dangling from the building.
