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Link to New York Times article is courtesy of ScrewLooseChange.blogspot.com:
GAITHERSBURG, Md. — Fires in the 47-story office tower at the edge of the World Trade Center site undermined floor beams and a critical structural column, federal investigators concluded on Thursday, as they attempted to curb still-rampant speculation that explosives caused the building’s collapse on Sept. 11, 2001.
No one died when the tower, 7 World Trade Center, tumbled, as the estimated 4,000 office workers there at the time had evacuated before it gave way, nearly seven hours after the second of the twin towers came down.
But the collapse of 7 World Trade Center — home at the time to branch offices of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service and the Giuliani administration’s emergency operations center — is cited in hundreds of Web sites and books as perhaps the most compelling evidence that an insider secretly planted explosives, intentionally destroying the tower.
A separate, preliminary report issued in 2002 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency questioned whether diesel fuel tanks installed in the tower to supply backup generators — including one that powered the Giuliani administration’s emergency “bunker” — might have been to blame.
But S. Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, based here in the suburbs of Washington, also rejected that theory on Thursday, even as he acknowledged that the collapse had been something of a puzzle.
“Our take-home message today is the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery,” Dr. Sunder said at a news conference at the institute’s headquarters. “It did not collapse from explosives or fuel oil fires.”
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