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The Obama administration on Friday gave up on its plan to try the Sept. 11 plotters in Lower Manhattan, bowing to almost unanimous pressure
from New York officials and business leaders to move the terrorism
trial elsewhere.

“I think I can acknowledge the obvious,” an administration official said. “We’re considering other options.”

The reversal on whether to try the alleged 9/11 terrorists blocks from the former World Trade Center site seemed to come suddenly this week,
after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg abandoned his strong support for the plan and said the cost and disruption would be too great.

But behind the brave face that many New Yorkers had put on for weeks, resistance had been gathering steam.

After a dinner in New York on Dec. 14, Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, pulled aside David Axelrod, President Obama’s closest adviser, to convey an urgent plea: move the 9/11 trial out of Manhattan.

More recently, in a series of presentations to business leaders, local elected officials and community representatives of Chinatown, Police
Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly
laid out his plan for securing the trial: blanketing a swath of Lower
Manhattan with police checkpoints, vehicle searches, rooftop snipers
and canine patrols.

“They were not received well,” said one city official.

And on Tuesday, in a meeting Mr. Bloomberg had with at least two dozen federal judges on the eighth floor of their Manhattan courthouse, one
judge raised the question of security. The mayor, according to several
people present, said he was sure the courthouse could be made safe, but
that it would be costly and difficult.

The next day, the mayor, who back in November had hailed the idea of trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other accused Sept. 11 plotters in the heart of downtown Manhattan, made clear he’d changed his mind.

The Obama administration official said the decision to back out of plans for a New York trial had broad support but had not yet been made
public.

Jason Post, a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg, said Friday night that the mayor would have no comment until the Obama administration had made an official announcement of its intentions.

Told of the administration’s decision, a spokesman for Mr. Kelly said, “We were not aware of that.”

But the spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said of Mr. Kelly: “He is of the mind that such a decision would give us some breathing room, but that
New York has to remain vigilant because it remains at the top of the
terrorist target list.”

“It is obvious that they can't have the trials in New York,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, New York's Democratic senior senator.

Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks on Wednesday set off a stampede of New York City officials, most of them Democrats well-disposed toward President Obama, who suddenly declared that a
civilian trial for the 9/11 suspects was a great idea — as long as it
didn’t happen in their city.

By Friday, Justice Department officials were studying other locations, focusing especially on military bases and prison complexes, and no obvious new choice had
emerged.

The story of how prominent New York officials seemed to have so quickly moved from a kind of “bring it on” bravado to an “anywhere but here” involves many factors, including a new anxiety
about terrorism after the attempted airliner bombing on Christmas Day.

Ultimately, it appears, New York officials could not tolerate ceding much of the city to a set of trials that could last for years.

“The administration is in a tricky political and legal position,” Julie Menin, a lawyer who is chairwoman of the 50-member Community Board 1
that represents Lower Manhattan, including the federal courthouse and
ground zero, said of President Obama and his Justice Department. “But
it means shutting down our financial district. It could cost $1
billion. It’s absolutely crazy.”

Ms. Menin said the turning point for her came when she heard Mr. Kelly’s security plan and cost estimates: hundreds of millions of dollars a year. “It was an absolute
game-changer,” she said. She wrote a Jan. 17 op-ed article for The New
York Times proposing moving the trial to Governors Island off
Manhattan; that idea did not catch hold, but the article escalated the
outcry against a Manhattan trial.

When the Justice Department announced in November its plans to try Mr. Mohammed and four alleged accomplices blocks from where the World Trade Center stood, Mr.
Bloomberg hailed the location as not only workable but as a powerful
symbol.

“It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site where so many New Yorkers were murdered,” the mayor said at
the time. The federal courthouse had hosted major terror trials
previously, he noted, and the police were more than up to the security
challenge.

And so it is possible that the reversal will call into question the calibrated effort of Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to bring the handling of suspected terrorists out of the realm of military emergency and into the halls of civilian justice.

If the message to Al Qaeda and its supporters in November was that New York City was able, even eager, to bring justice to those who plotted mass murder, the message
of January is far less confident.

“This will be one more stroke for Al Qaeda’s propaganda,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

The breakdown of support for the trials in New York might have actually been assisted by the way New York officials were first notified by the
Obama administration.

Mr. Holder called Mr. Bloomberg and Gov. David A. Paterson only a few hours before his public announcement on Nov. 13; and Mr. Kelly got a similar call that morning from Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, whose office had been picked to prosecute the cases.

But by the time those calls were made, the decision had already been reported in the news media, which was how Mr. Bloomberg learned about
it, according to mayoral aides.

One senior Bloomberg official, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to antagonize the White House, said: “When Holder was making the decision he didn’t call Ray
Kelly and say, ‘What do you think?’ He didn’t call the mayor and say,
‘What would your position be?’ They didn’t reach out until it got out
there.”

Soon, though, New York real estate executives were raising concerns with the Obama administration, according to Mr. Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.

Mr. Spinola said he had received calls and e-mail messages from the board’s members. Residential real estate brokers were “going berserk,” as he
put it, worried that they would no longer be able to sell apartments
downtown.

Commercial brokers feared they would not be able to lease office space.

On Nov. 20, the Friday before Thanksgiving, the real estate executive William C. Rudin held a meeting at his office to talk about issues with
Jim Messina, a deputy White House chief of staff, according to Mr.
Spinola.

The meeting was not on the topic of the trials, but the executives pressed their case anyway.

Mr. Spinola said that he told Mr. Messina, “I hope that the White House was going to put a ton of money into it.”

A turning point came when Mr. Kelly spoke before a large business crowd at a New York Police Foundation breakfast on Jan. 13.

After addressing the year’s highlights in crime reduction, he turned to the 9/11 trials, offering a presentation that was direct and graphic.

“Whatever the merits of holding the trial in Lower Manhattan,” he said, “it will certainly raise the level of threat.” He said that “securing this area
and the entire city for the duration of this event promises to be an
extremely demanding undertaking.”

He offered a detailed account of his department’s security plan, with inner and outer perimeters, unannounced vehicle checkpoints, countersniper teams on rooftops, and
hazardous-materials and bomb squad personnel ready to respond. And he
cited the hundreds of millions it would cost to protect the city.

“The entire audience issued a collective gasp when it became clear that this was an event that could go on for years,” said one guest, Kathryn S.
Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York
City.

The unhappiness grew. During the Real Estate Board of New York’s annual gala, held on Jan. 21, Mr. Bloomberg dropped by, and Bloomberg officials said they got “an earful on that” from real estate
executives, all of whom were angry about the plan.

A week later, his public opinion had changed, and so, it seems, had the ultimate destination of the trials.

Jet Diverted in Scare

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Continental Airlines jet flying from Newark, N.J., to Bogota was diverted to Jacksonville, Fla., on Friday over concerns
that a passenger was on the government’s watch list of suspected
terrorists banned from commercial flights. It turned out to be a case
of mistaken identity.

The passenger — one of 75 — was cleared by the F.B.I. and permitted to continue on the flight to Colombia, the Transportation Security Administration said.