US crisis update: Compaq staffer joins list of attack victims

NEWS Employees from Compaq, 3Com, BEA Systems and Oracle were among the victims of Tuesday's plane crashes in the US. Jeff Coombs, a Compaq employee, was aboard AA flight 11. Jeff was a technology consultant in the financial services practice of Compaq Global Services. Additionally, four other Compaq employees based in the World Trade Center towers were missing (as of Wednesday 13:00BST). BEA Systems has confirmed that one of its engineers, Ed Felt, was a passenger on flight 93, which hit the Pentagon. 3Com public relations manager Mark Bingham was also onboard flight 93, and Oracle has confirmed that at least one of its employees was on one of the four flights that crashed. Oracle is trying to contact half a dozen employees who were in the World Trade Center building at the time of the crash. US e-security firm Netegrity said its CFO James Hayden died on Flight 175, and ASP eLogic has lost its interim CEO Jeff Mladenik along with business development director Andrew Curry, both travelling on flight 11. Danny Lewin, founder and CTO of web caching technology company Akamai, was another who died on that flight. Sun Microsystems also lost a software engineer.