Police investigate the space between a mosque and another building in New York where authorities believe a piece of landing gear belonging to one of the airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, was found. Police say the medical examiner's office will complete a health and safety evaluation to determine whether to sift the soil around the buildings for possible human remains. Photo

NEW YORK (AP) — A rusted 5-foot-tall piece of landing gear believed to be from one of the hijacked planes destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks has been discovered wedged between a mosque site and a luxury high-rise apartment building near the World Trade Center.

The twisted metal part has cables and levers on it and is about 3 feet wide and 1.5 feet deep. It includes a clearly visible Boeing Co. identification number, New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne said Friday.

“The odds of this being wedged between there is amazing,” Browne said, adding it was not surprising that it went undiscovered for more than a decade given the location. “It had to have fallen just the right way to make it into that space.”

Browne said other World Trade Center wreckage had been discovered nearby, possibly even at the same buildings, in years past.

Police detectives and National Transportation Safety Board investigators will determine whether the equipment is from the American Airlines plane or the United Airlines plane that slammed into the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, destroying the towers and killing thousands of people.