A handful of high-flying financial corporations appear to have borne the brunt of the terrorist attack that killed thousands of office workers in the twin towers of the World Trade Center that until two days ago dominated lower Manhattan's skyline.
As New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani revealed Thursday that the number missing had risen to 4,763, there was every indication that leading bond traders Cantor Fitzgerald may have been the worst hit company of all, with as many as 700 of its employees still unaccounted for.
"It is clear we have incurred heavy loss of life among our colleagues and friends," Cantor Fitzgerald chairman Howard Lutnick said in a statement which did not specify any numbers.
The New York Times reported Thursday that three companies alone -- Cantor Fitzgerald, money managers Marsh and McLennan, and security firm Keefe Bruyette and Woods -- accounted for 1,500 of those missing.
This would still leave another 3,000 likely buried beneath the rubble of the two once-soaring towers, among them close to 300 firefighters and some 60 police.
The tenant list of the World Trade Center had read like a Who's Who of top US finance houses, the biggest of them Morgan Stanley Dean Witter which housed 3,500 of 50,000 workers in the two buildings.
Morgan Stanley chairman and chief executive officer Philip Purcell said in a statement the "vast majority" of his company's people had survived the carnage.
"This past Tuesday, many of us who work at the World Trade Center returned home to our loved ones. Sadly, all of us did not," he said in another message published in New York newspapers Thursday.
With figures hard to come by in the continuing confusion, neither local authorities nor consulates could give any idea of the number of foreigners missing.
But observers noted that the international nature of the companies based in the Center -- banks, brokerages and bond traders alike -- would surely mean that a significant number of foreigners would be found among the dead.
Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese companies were among the tenants of the North Tower, the first to be hit in the twin attack on the Twin Towers by two hijacked commercial airliners.
Cantor Fitzgerald occupied five of the top 10 floors in the 110-storey North Tower, giving relatives precious little reason for hope that many of its missing may still be alive.
Cantor chairman Lutnick, who was not in the building at the time of the attack, said "we do not at this time have any means of determining with certainty the whereabouts of employees who are missing or unaccounted for."
The Long Island newspaper Newsday reported that Lutnick's brother was believed to have been in the Cantor offices at the time, as was the company's chief strategist William Meehan.
Families of missing Cantor Fitzgerald employees sought comfort and courage from numbers as they gathered at the home of one of the bereft, among them the wife of 35-year-old Tim Gilbert, one of two brothers not heard from since the Twin Towers collapsed.
"Tim has four babies," his wife cried as she showed on television two photographs of her husband and his brother Andrew, 39.
"We've checked with the hospitals, we've called them all but they have no information," sobbed the wife of Anthony Sharita, also missing from the North Tower.
Financial analysts estimated that Cantor Fitzgerald handled about 25 percent of transactions in the multi-trillion dollar US government bond market.
The company said in a statement it was planning to resume business Thursday through its international arms.
In all some 26 foreign companies had offices in the World Trade Center. Upper floor tenants included companies such as insurer AON Corporation, Fuji Bank, Fiduciary Trust Company and, in the South Tower, Morgan Stanley, which occupied floors 58 through 74 – NEW YORK (AFP)
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