FBI says it has names of hijackers

Inquiry zeroes in on links to terrorist groups

09/13/2001

By MICHELLE MITTELSTADT / The Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON – U.S. law enforcement officials hunted Wednesday for accomplices of the suicide hijackers, using thousands of agents in a global effort of unprecedented magnitude.

The FBI said its agents had confirmed most of the hijackers' identities, using airline passenger lists, intercepted phone calls and Internet records. They served search warrants in three states and detained people for questioning but, by late Wednesday, had made no arrests directly linked to Tuesday's strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

FBI Director Robert Mueller said some of the hijackers had ties to terrorist organizations, though he and other federal officials did not link the men to longtime terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden. In Congress and elsewhere, though, there were indications that the investigation was pointing toward the fugitive Saudi.

FBI officials said they were trying to find reputed bin Laden associate Moataz Al-Hallak, the former religious leader of an Arlington, Texas mosque, to ask him what He knew about the attacks. Mr. Al-Hallak has denied knowing Mr. bin Laden or having any connection with him.

Search warrants have been filed in San Antonio, a federal official said, declining to comment further.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said a passenger list for one of Tuesday's four fatal flights included the name of a suspected bin Laden supporter. And U.S. intelligence, Mr. Hatch said, monitored communications in which bin Laden supporters discussed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said intelligence and law enforcement officials are focusing on two Middle East countries as the hijackers' bases.

"They have leads on where these people got their passports," she said.

Ms. Hutchison said that Mr. bin Laden was a prime suspect but that other terrorist groups also are under investigation. She said one of the countries that may have harbored the terrorists is the United Arab Emirates; she declined to name the second nation.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, said there could be three countries involved. He said intelligence officials are trying to determine whether one terrorist group was involved, or if several groups were well enough organized to have launched a coordinated offense.

"There are two schools of thought," said Mr. Reyes, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. "One is that there is a very loose alliance. Another is that there is a chillingly close alliance."

Justice Department officials declined to discuss any evidence linking the attacks to Mr. bin Laden, who is believed to have been responsible for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and a subsequent attack on the USS Cole.

"I don't think everyone in Congress has enough information to make those assumptions," said Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker.

Meanwhile, federal officials sketched the outlines of a plot even more breathtaking than previously known.

The White House and Air Force One were targets, Attorney General John Ashcroft said, citing "credible evidence" compiled by the government.

The American Airlines jet that hurtled into the Pentagon was originally intended to hit the White House, said President Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer. He declined to provide further information.

Three to six hijackers were aboard each of the four hijacked flights Tuesday, armed with knives and box cutters, Mr. Ashcroft said after briefing Congress about the investigation into what he termed an "act of war."

Search warrants were executed Wednesday in Florida, New Jersey and Massachusetts, federal officials said. Several more warrants still were being served, a federal law enforcement official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Much of the investigative focus centered Wednesday on Boston, where the two planes that crashed into the World Trade Center towers originated. Agents also searched homes in Florida and stopped a Washington-bound train in Providence, R.I.

Some officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they were investigating whether one group of hijackers crossed at a Canadian border checkpoint and made its way to Boston just before the attack. The officials confirmed that a sedan thought to belong to the hijackers was confiscated in Boston and contained an Arabic language flight manual.

They also said that the FBI searched two Boston hotel rooms thought to have been used by the hijackers. The officials found information linked to a name on the manifest of one of the hijacked flights. They declined to identify the man.

The Boston Globe reported on its Web site Wednesday that three people were taken into custody at the hotel and that they were linked to a credit card used to buy tickets on the flights that crashed into the World Trade Center. It cited an anonymous source close to the investigation.

Ms. Hutchison said officials gleaned other information from a piece of luggage belonging to a hijacking suspect that did not make an airplane connection in Portland, Maine. The bag contained another flight manual in Arabic and a copy of the Koran.

Abu Dhabi Television in the United Arab Emirates reported that two men with Saudi Arabian passports and international driver's licenses issued in the UAE were linked to the Mitsubishi found at the Boston airport.

All of the hijackers who steered the planes to their deadly targets were trained in the United States, a Justice Department official said.

At least two suspected hijackers received pilot instruction last year at a Florida airport, where they briefly lived with one of their flight school's employees.

The two men – Mohamed Atta and a second man who identified himself only as Mawran – moved into the home of Charlie and Drew Voss shortly after enrolling in July at the Huffman Aviation Inc. flight school in Venice, Fla. Ms. Voss said she and her husband allowed the pair to move in to one of their bedrooms because the apartments that are normally rented to foreign students at the school were full. But they asked the two men to leave after only a week because they were rude and slovenly, Ms. Voss said.

"They were more to themselves than anyone we'd ever had here before," she said. "If we asked questions they didn't like, they would just flush us off."

Ms. Voss said FBI agents questioned her and her husband early Wednesday morning, telling them that a 1989 Pontiac Grand Prix seized at Logan International Airport in Boston had been registered to their home address. Mr. Atta was listed as owner of the car.

When FBI agents told her and her husband that their former boarders may have helped pilot one of the airplanes that toppled the World Trade Center towers, she said: "We both went in shock. We couldn't believe what we were hearing."

Ms. Voss said Mr. Atta and his companion told her husband that they were from Germany. She said they immediately doubted that because of their accents and appearance.

Investigators think the men paid $25,000 apiece to become proficient enough to learn how to fly turbo-prop aircraft.

More than 4,000 FBI agents and 3,000 support personnel are working on the investigation worldwide, the FBI said, with command centers in New York, Washington, Boston and Los Angeles.

The investigation's chief focus, FBI Director Mueller said, is identifying any associates who remain in the United States to "remove any threat to the air system in the future."

A number of individuals "whom we believe may have had something to do with the hijackings" have been identified, he said.

"We are pursuing those leads aggressively," he said. The second objective "is to gather any and all evidence we have as to whom assisted the hijackers, not only in this country, but also overseas," Mr. Mueller said. "We will leave no stone unturned until we have determined who was responsible for these attacks on our freedom."

The Associated Press and the Florida Sun-Sentinal contributed to this report, along with Robert Dodge and Alfredo Corchado in Washington and Steve McGonigle and Lee Hancock in Dallas.