Revised Account of Cole Bombing Raises Concerns

WASHINGTON —  The terrorist bombing of the Cole occurred almost two hours after the U.S. warship had finished docking in Yemen last week, not during the mooring procedure when it was surrounded by small work boats, the Navy said Friday.

The revised account of the sequence of events leading up to the Oct. 12 bombing is significant because it calls into question one of the key initial assumptions about the event.

The Navy previously maintained that the attack came only minutes after the Cole had tied up at the dock. Navy officials said the terrorists did not raise suspicions because their boat appeared to be participating in the mooring process, in which small harbor vessels took the ship’s lines and secured them to a refueling barge.

The revision raises new questions about the Navy’s security procedures, which apparently allowed the attackers to maneuver their boat close enough to the guided missile destroyer to inflict massive damage at a time when there was no need for harbor boats to be in the vicinity.

The attack killed 17 U.S. sailors and injured 39.

In a brief statement, the Navy’s information office said the explosion occurred at 11:18 a.m., well after the ship had completed mooring operations at 9:30 a.m. Fueling had begun at 10:30 a.m., the Navy said.

The Navy has said the Cole’s crew was observing the 5th Fleet’s second-highest level of alert at the time of the blast. Under those procedures, crew members would have been assigned to watch through binoculars for boats approaching the Cole. Other sailors would have been maintaining an armed guard.

It was not clear why those precautions did not prevent the attack.

The Navy said the revised timeline was based on an examination of the ship’s records, prompted by a report in the Navy Times, a civilian-owned newspaper covering naval affairs.

“Earlier statements by senior Navy leadership were based on the initial voice . . . reports from the ship,” the Navy said. “As is often the case, these initial reports contained some errors, and in some cases were misunderstood back here.”

The blast knocked out the ship’s power and communications facilities.

The Navy Times said it learned of the discrepancy in the military’s original account from an unidentified source associated with the port of Aden in Yemen.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, said the bomb exploded at 12:15 p.m., just after the Cole had completed docking and before it began refueling. He noted that the information was based on initial reports and might not be “100% accurate.”

On Friday, the last four bodies of U.S. sailors killed in the bombing were flown out of Aden for Dover Air Force Base in Delaware after a quiet ceremony on a steamy tarmac. The remains were recovered Thursday.

The removal of the final bodies from the Cole allows the FBI and other investigators to more thoroughly search the ship for forensic evidence in their effort to find those who built the bomb, packed it into a small boat and sailed it up alongside the destroyer.

Yemen’s largest newspaper, Al Ayyam, reported Friday that two houses in Aden are being investigated in the search for those who planned the operation. One house was used to make the bomb, and the occupants had stayed there for two months, the paper reported; the other house was used while welding was done on the small boat used to blow a 40-by-40-foot hole in the Cole.

The FBI and Yemeni authorities have already scoured one small house in an area of the city called Cood Nimr, but there was no official confirmation of a second house.

The newspaper reported that the occupants of the homes were friendly with neighbors and enjoyed playing soccer. One was bearded, the paper said, and the other was short and dark-skinned. Al Ayyam said they appeared to be no more than 28 years old.

The paper went on to say that a car found near a bridge where police think the boat might have been put into the water was registered to a Somalian woman.

Police have made no arrests. The landlord and real estate agent who rented the home where the bomb-making equipment was found have been detained for questioning.

U.S. investigators warn that the probe will be long, but they say it has already made good progress.

U.S. officials say they are treating militant Osama bin Laden as a suspect in the case. The wealthy Saudi, who has been indicted in the U.S. in connection with the August 1998 terrorist bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, has called for attacks on U.S. interests around the world.

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Kempster reported from Washington and Kelly from Aden.