DID A YOUNG PAKISTANI FORESAW THE 911 ATTACK?


The story recounted of a kid who bragged around school before the
attacks that the World Trade Center was going to be destroyed. On
October 11, an aggressive young reporter for The JournalNews of
Westchester, N.Y. — Jeffrey Scott Shapiro — published a article that
tracked the story down to New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn.
Shapiro identified a teacher who witnessed a freshman in her class
saying: “Do you see those two buildings? They won’t be standing
there next week.” “This is the only case we know of where someone
said the World Trade Center was coming down prior to it happening,”
a police source told me. I had to take a closer look.
The school offers courses in Urdu because 116 students come
from Pakistan.

On September 6 — five days before the attack —
Antoinette DiLorenzo, who teaches English as a second language to a
class of Pakistani immigrants, led a class discussion about world
events. She asked a freshman (his name has been withheld): “What are
you looking at?” The youth was peering out the third floor window
toward lower Manhattan. After he made the remark about the World
Trade center not being there next week, the teacher didn’t
immediately think much of it, though it stuck in her mind.
On September 11, school was canceled after the attack and again the
following day. On Thursday September 13, a clearly agitated
DiLorenzo, saying she had been afraid to come forward, reported the
incident to the principal’s office. “It scared the hell out of
everyone,” according to a source at the school. The police and FBI
were alerted and twelve NYPD officers entered the school and secured
DiLorenzo’s classroom for three hours, locking the doors with the
students inside. While the students were brought lunch and a movie
and told to be calm, the youth in question and his older brother, a
sophomore, were taken to be interrogated by the FBI, stationed at
the police precinct nearby. DiLorenzo, the key to the believability
of this story, was also questioned. She was described by school
officials as having a superb and unblemished record in the New York
school system. A police source described her as “100 percent
credible.” Moreover, according to police, the youth confirmed having
made the September 6 statement about the towers. At the moment he
did so, his older brother elbowed him, said he had been “kidding,”
and the youth in question agreed. The younger brother seemed upset
and said he was “having a bad day.” When asked why, he said that his
father was supposed to come back from Pakistan that day.

TRUTH NO ANSWER So what to make of all of this? There is no doubt in
my mind that the story is true. But what does it mean? There are
only three possibilities:
1.) the youth was clairvoyant;
2.) the youth, knowing about the 1993 bombing, was just venting anger in a
particularly timely way;
3.) word of the attack on the World Trade Center was rumored in his
family or neighborhood and he heard about it.
Investigators don’t know what to believe. On the one hand, one
argues, “This is too much of a coincidence that the kid said this”
before September 11. On the other hand, scores of tips in the area
have not checked out when pursued by police. One police officer says
he would need a couple of other similarly confirmed cases to
conclude definitively that word was on the street. In the meantime,
police and school authorities in Brooklyn are looking ahead. “It’s
creepy,” one told me before I got on the subway to go back to the
office. “But what the hell are we going to do about it now?”

ABSTRACT FROM :

http://www.msnbc.com/news/642074.asp?0si=-&cp1=1#BODY