Many New Yorkers say Sept. 11 trial a security risk

* Trial of accused Sept. 11 plotter stokes debate

* 40 percent of New Yorkers say trial ups risk of attack

* Some on Wall Street sickened by prospect of trial

By Edith Honan

NEW YORK, Nov 17 (Reuters) - Forty percent of New Yorkers believe the trial of accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed makes an attack on the city more likely, according to a new poll, while security experts say it is already the top target in America.

The planned trial of Mohammed and four accused accomplices has stoked debate in the city where nearly 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor at the time of the attacks, and others say it makes the city a target, but police say they can handle such events. Some on Wall Street who lost colleagues in the attacks say they are sickened at the prospect.

A Marist College Institute for Public Opinion poll on Tuesday found 40 percent of New Yorkers say holding the trial blocks from Ground Zero, the site of the destroyed World Trade towers, increases likelihood of another attack in the city.

The telephone survey of 602 New Yorkers had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

A Daily News editorial on Tuesday called the trial, "a profoundly wrong step that will undermine the War on Terror and increase the threat to New York."

But Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counter-terrorism chief, said: "It will be an extraordinary event in terms of media coverage and the public reaction to the theater ... but in terms of physically presenting a greater threat to the city of New York, or the citizens of New York, I don't think so."

"I'm not sure it presents any greater danger to New York, which is already a symbol for terrorists," he said.

U.S. Republican Representative Peter King of New York took the opposite view.

"Detaining and trying these five terrorists only a few blocks from the World Trade Center site where, by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's design, thousands were brutally murdered puts our nation -- and New York City -- at greater risk," King said.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said last week the five men would be removed from the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba ahead of their trial in a Manhattan federal court, which he called an ideal venue and the site of many successful prosecutions of accused terrorists since 2001.

POLICE SAY CITY IS PREPARED

New York City's police department said the city will handle the trial without security problems.

"There's already security improvements in the area that lend itself to providing a secure environment for a trial like this," said police spokesman Paul Browne. "We've dealt with high-profile events, including terrorism-related ones, many times. We're prepared for this one."

He declined to detail what precautions were planned or the costs for trial security, except to say that he expected Washington to reimburse the city for its costs.

Browne said eight terrorism plots against the city have been scuttled since 2001, including plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and the retaining wall at Ground Zero.

The five accused men could be brought to New York within weeks and will likely be held in a high-security wing of the Metropolitan Correctional Center known as "10-South," a fortress-like unit in the heart of the Chinatown neighborhood.

The lower Manhattan jail has held multiple high-profile defendants in recent years, including Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the "Blind Sheik", who was convicted in 1995 for conspiring to blow up the United Nations building and other New York City landmarks, and admitted U.S. swindler Bernard Madoff.

"The defendants in this case (will) go from their jail to the courthouse without ever being outside," Browne said.

Giuliani said the trial would give "an unnecessary advantage to the terrorists" and pose risks to New York. "Anyone that tells you this doesn't create additional security problems, of course, isn't telling you the truth," said Giuliani, who spoke to CNN and Fox News.

Michael Bloomberg, the current mayor, said, "It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site where so many New Yorkers were murdered."

As many as 7 percent of New Yorkers have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder because of the Sept. 11 attacks, said Yuval Neria, director of the Trauma and PTSD Program at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University. And while the trial could be cathartic for some, "for others, it will be brutally painful," Neria said.

Howard Lutnick, chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 658 of its 960 New York employees in the Sept. 11 attacks, said he found the planned trial distressing.

"The concept of this being a circus just nauseates me. I can't get my head around it," Lutnick told the Reuters Global Finance Summit in New York. (Writing by Mark Egan, reporting by Edith Honan; Editing by Paul Simao)