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by Nicholas
Wapshott
RECOVERY workers
at Ground Zero have discovered hundreds of gold ingots, part of a
billion dollar cache which was lost when the twin towers fell.
Workers clearing
rubble in a service tunnel underneath one of the collapsed World Trade
Centre buildings found themselves surrounded by more than 100 armed FBI
and secret service personnel, who had been tipped off by the owners
where the gold was buried.
The collapsed
buildings contained a number of vaults and strongrooms, but the police
were not saying who owned the gold.
The Comex metals
trading division of the New York Mercantile Exchange kept 3,800 gold
bars — weighing 12 tonnes and worth more than $100 million (£70 million)
— in vaults in the building’s basement. Comex also held almost 800,000
ounces of gold there on behalf of others with a value of about $220
million. It also held more than 102 million ounces of silver, worth $430
million.
The Bank of Nova
Scotia, which kept gold in the Comex vault, reported $200 million of
gold lost in the wreckage. Comex also held precious metals for Chase
Manhattan Bank, the Bank of New York and Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking.
The vaults higher
up the towers became burial chambers on September 11 as some workers
tried in vain to protect themselves from the fire and smoke by taking
refuge inside them.
The gold, which
was discovered on Tuesday, was being transported through the basement of
the building on the morning of September 11. Recovery workers reached a
service tunnel and discovered a ten-wheel lorry and a number of cars
which had been crushed by falling steel.
A temporary ramp
was built to gain access to the tunnel and a small bulldozer was used to
break through a wall. Then a team of police and firefighters arrived to
put the gold into an armoured bullion lorry. Other workers were told to
make themselves scarce. “If I tried to go down there they would have
shot me,” one said.
Eight years ago,
when the World Trade Centre was bombed by terrorists, more than $1
billion in gold was being kept in the basement vaults, the property of
the Kuwaiti Government. The vaults withstood the blast.
At first police
believed the terrorist attack was an attempted gold robbery. Since then
the amount of gold kept under the World Trade Centre has been a
carefully guarded secret.
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