Investigators sifted through trash at a Hartford, Conn., incinerator Sunday, looking for any signs of missing Yale graduate student Annie Le, the New Haven Independent reported.
Authorities intensified their search efforts for Le after finding bloody clothing above ceiling tiles in the five-story building where Le worked as a pharmacology graduate student.
The blood-stained clothes were not the clothes Le was last seen wearing, law enforcement sources told the New Haven Register Sunday afternoon. They did not elaborate any further.
The items have not yet been linked to Le, who was last seen on surveillance video Tuesday, entering the lab building on 10 Amistad Street in New Haven — less than a mile from Yale's main campus.
The FBI said Saturday that only "potential evidence" has been seized in the search for Le, a 24-graduate student who was set to be married Sunday in New York.
Parts of the lab building have been labeled a crime scene, WTNH-TV reported Sunday.
"Items that could potentially be evidence have been seized. None have yet been associated with Annie Le,” FBI Special Agent Kim Mertz said while declining to confirm reports that the evidence included bloody clothing.
"We are not in a position to conclude whether this is a missing persons case or whether criminality is involved," Mertz said.
Last seen
Le was last seen about 10 a.m. Tuesday morning on surveillance camera outside a lab in the Yale School of Medicine complex.
About the same time, she swiped her Yale ID at the facility's entrance. There was no footage of her leaving the building, in spite of a fire alarm that went off about 12:40 p.m. The alarm isn't thought to be connected to her disappearance.
Her purse, cell phone, credit cards and money were found in her office, a few blocks from the lab. She has not contacted her fiance, family or friends since Tuesday.
The New York Daily News, citing an unnamed police source, reported earlier Friday that detectives had questioned a Yale professor. Le, a doctoral student in pharmacology at the Ivy League university, was supposed to attend the professor's class Tuesday afternoon, but the course was canceled shortly before Le was reported missing, according to the Daily News.
But Lorimer told the Yale Daily News later that there was no reason to believe a professor is a suspect in the case.
Pending WeddingMeanwhile, the missing woman's family canceled her Sunday wedding on Long Island, N.Y., according to a supervisor at the hall where the ceremony and reception were to have taken place.
"The wedding is off," Nadeen Fotopoulos, a manager at the North Ritz Club in Syosset, told the News. She said 160 guests were supposed to attend.
"It's very sad," she told the paper. "The hall will be dark Sunday morning."
Detectives were spotted Saturday questioning a man outside the lab where Le worked. When they finished talking, the man got in the front seat of an unmarked car and one of the FBI agents got in the back seat. The car then drove away.
Authorities previously said they had no evidence to indicate foul play in Le's disappearance. More than 100 investigators are working on the case.
On Friday, Yale offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the missing student. Investigators searched her office, the lab facilities where she did research and her apartment.
Investigators were examining security camera footage from some 75 cameras near the building where Le was last spotted.
"They are going frame by frame, looking at every image," Conroy said Friday.
Le, a California native, was to be married to Jonathan Widawsky, a graduate student in physics at Columbia University. The two met as undergraduates at the University of Rochester. Widawsky has been cooperating with the investigation and is not considered a suspect, authorities say.
Investigators scoured the university research building yesterday, with dozens of officials going in and out of the lab on Amistad Street and searching it with German shepherds.
Le is 4-foot-11, 90 pounds and of Asian descent with brown hair and brown eyes.
Following the trash- Searching the incerator and rubbish dumps
FBI agents said they are "following the trash" taken from a medical lab in New Haven to a waste processing plant in Hartford called the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority.
A State Police canine unit was also on scene.
The attention of local, state, and federal investigators remains also on that lab at 10 Amistad Street on Yale's medical campus, the place the 24-year-old from California works and where she was last seen Tuesday morning.
bloody clothes were found in the ceiling inside the lab. Two newspaper reports on Sunday cited a source within the Yale Police Department as saying the clothing was not what Le was wearing when she entered the facility that Tuesday.
"All I will say is that items that could potentially be evidence have been seized. None have yet been associated with Annie Le," FBI Special Agent in charge Kim Mertz said on Saturday. "Until something is associated with Annie Le, I'm not going to speculate."
Investigators sifted through garbage at an incinerator Sunday, looking for clues into the disappearance of a Yale University graduate student who was supposed to be celebrating her wedding day.
The death toll so far in Taiwan stood at 15, with 55 missing and 32 hurt, since Typhoon Morakot struck the island on Friday and remained in the area through the weekend before battering China's populous east coast.
Rescue squads aboard helicopters had saved only 45 people from Hsiao Lin, a village of 1,000 in southern Taiwan. Rains washed out roads and bridges in Kaohsiung County, severing all land vehicle traffic.
"No small number of single-storey houses have been covered in mudslides," said Richard Hu, an army major-general. "We don't know how many people are there, but homes have definitely been buried."
Local officials said they had lost contact with up to 600 villagers, with inclement weather reducing even helicopter access. The storm caused floods in Taiwan's densely-populated south and farm-related losses on the island were estimated at T$4.2 billion ($128 million).
Morakot killed 22 people in the Philippines. In China, it damaged more than 1,800 houses in the province of Zhejiang and killed at least one child, the official Xinhua news agency said.
One million people were evacuated in China before the storm made landfall and losses were estimated at 2.2 billion yuan ($322 million).
Witnesses Account
Lin Chien-chung, a rescued villager, told the United Evening News Paper that his home and neighbourhood were buried and up to 600 people could have suffered the same fate. However, rescuers said that the figure was an overestimate. “The mudslide covered a large part of the village, including a primary school and many homes. A part of the mountain above us just fell on the village.”
Another man could not hold back tears. “The mountain buried everyone in the middle of the night. There was no escape.”
One local government official in Sayo was found drowned in his car and the body of a woman was recovered from a gutter. In Okayama, a 68-year-old woman was killed by a landslide as earth loosened by the intense rain bore down upon her house. Cars were upended and wooden houses were half toppled by the waters. The lower floors of even stronger buildings were inundated with mud and debris.
