CANDACE SMITH
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The search for victims from last week's terror attack on the Pentagon is beginning to wind down, and the FBI, with rescuers moving out, is preparing to step up its investigation.
A top FBI official predicted Thursday the site will become primarily a crime scene investigation by the weekend.
``We continue in search and recovery mode, but a major focus will be on crime scene investigation,'' said Van Harp, head of the FBI's Washington field office.
About 450 federal and local law enforcers, firefighters and military personnel were working on evidence collection and processing, Harp said.
About 200 truckloads of rubble have been removed from the scene.
Debris is examined before being carted out of the collapsed area where a hijacked airliner penetrated halfway through the Pentagon's west face. It's then moved to a Pentagon parking lot, where dozens of crime-scene technicians, clad in protective clothing and wearing breathing apparatus, catalog potential evidence.
The process is slow and methodical, Harp said. He expects agents to continue the investigation for more than a month at the building housing the U.S. armed forces headquarters.
Harp refused to reveal what evidence has been recovered but said agents expect to recover more.
The last of the four Federal Emergency Management Agency searching teams was to leave the site Friday. Lette Birn and her dog Guinness, of the New Mexico team, searched for victims from Tuesday until Thursday.
``We did not find any live (people), but we did have some other finds,'' Birn said.
Officials at the Pentagon raised the grim possibility that some victims may never be accounted for.
Of the 189 people believed to have died as a result of the attack, only 40 sets of remains had been identified by the Defense Department by Thursday evening.
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