None Jailed Appear Linked to Attacks

Nine weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, federal authorities said Thursday that they have found no evidence indicating that any of the roughly 1,200 people arrested in the United States played a role in the suicide hijacking plot.

The FBI has conducted an exhaustive investigation into whether the 19 suspected hijackers were part of an organized underground of “sleeper” terrorist cells operating within the United States. While investigators continue to look for evidence of such a broad-based conspiracy, so far they have found none, according to several law enforcement officials.

In particular, said one senior law enforcement official, “no links have been established” between the hijackers and the four men believed to be the strongest terrorism suspects: two men from India arrested Sept. 12 on a train in Texas, a former Boston cabdriver arrested outside Chicago and a former flight school student who was arrested in Minnesota in August.

Some authorities emphasize the possibility that investigators, whose efforts have been frustrated by uncooperative witnesses, might still uncover evidence linking the jailed suspects to the plots or other terrorist or criminal activities.

But others maintain that if such evidence existed, the exhaustive investigation by more than 4,000 federal agents would have found it. Agents here and abroad have compared the whereabouts of the suspects and the alleged hijackers, scrutinized all of their bank, credit card, Internet and phone records, and even tracked them back to their hometowns in a search for links, authorities say.

The criminal investigation into the attacks, the largest in U.S. history, has netted about 1,200 detainees, and as many as half of them may still be behind bars on immigration violations or unrelated local, state or federal charges. But with these four central men all but eliminated as potential co-conspirators, the Justice Department has failed to build a case against a single prime U.S. suspect in the terrorist attacks, authorities concede.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft has emphasized that the key goal of the investigation is the prevention of other attacks. And, authorities say, though they have provided no evidence, the arrests may have thwarted other terrorist plots.

Meantime, investigators still are collecting bits of information on the hijackers and suspects arrested in the U.S. They have discovered, for instance, that the alleged hijacker who piloted the plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field had been stopped for speeding in Maryland just two days before the hijackings.

But major domestic leads appear to have dried up. As a result, authorities say, they have shifted nearly all of their attention and resources overseas in the continuing hunt for co-conspirators and suspected terrorists.

Nevertheless, investigators remain highly interested in the “mysterious circumstances” surrounding the four central men, the senior law enforcement official said.

4 Central Suspects Undergo Much Scrutiny

The Indian men, Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, were apprehended on an Amtrak train while possessing box cutters. Nabil al-Marabh, the onetime cabdriver, was connected to a suspected member of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and had recently received a Michigan permit to haul hazardous waste, setting off a review of hazardous material drivers.

And the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French Algerian man in Minnesota, contained references to crop dusting and chemical dispersal.

“They act suspicious and you don’t know why,” said one official involved with the investigation. “It sends flags up.”

But, the official said, “to date there are no connections. We’re still looking, and the matter is still under investigation. You don’t know what will happen in the future, but nothing yet.”

Authorities now say they have turned their focus to the dozens of suspects who have been detained in Europe since Sept. 11 and to captured or defected Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan.

U.S. investigators remain convinced that Bin Laden and his top aides orchestrated and financed the hijackings. But they have struggled to determine who may have worked directly with the 19 suspected hijackers and who acted as liaisons with Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan.

“The major investigative activity is coming outside the United States,” a government official familiar with the investigation said Thursday. “Most of the main accomplices are located outside the United States.”

Worldwide Manhunt Continues for Fugitives

Hundreds of FBI agents have fanned out across Germany, other European countries and the Middle East, working with authorities there in a search for clues, connections and potential suspects.

A number of suspects have been apprehended in Europe, and three fugitives from Hamburg, Germany--including a man who the FBI believes was meant to be the 20th hijacker--are being sought on international arrest warrants.

Another prime suspect is Mustafa Ahmad, who authorities believe is a close Bin Laden associate who may have funneled as much as $500,000 in Al Qaeda money to the hijackers’ training and living expenses.

And Lotfi Raissi, an Algerian being held in London on a U.S. extradition warrant, is a pilot who British authorities say trained at least four of the hijackers to fly.

Neil Herman, a former FBI counter-terrorism expert who supervised the investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and has maintained contacts with bureau investigators, said the overseas investigation could prove crucial in helping authorities determine the broad outlines of the hijacking plot.

It could also help shed light on whether the suspects still being held in the United States played some as-yet-unestablished role, particularly if suspects caught overseas begin to cooperate, Herman said.

“I think the investigation is somewhat at a crossroads, but a positive crossroads,” Herman said. Investigators “are developing a great deal of intelligence on these [terrorist] cells, particularly in Europe, and the better intelligence becomes as time goes on in Afghanistan, the more cooperators we’ll get.

“A lot of [the U.S. suspects] are not cooperating and talking at all, but that will change in time, as long as [authorities] continue to make significant arrests in Spain, in Germany, in London and elsewhere. It’s a matter of time before people begin to cooperate, and from there, the house of cards will fall.”

Robert Blitzer, the FBI’s former chief of counter-terrorism, was less optimistic in his assessment. He said the U.S.-held suspects have been investigated so thoroughly by now that agents most certainly would have found any terrorist connections.

“It’s just not panning out the way they thought,” said Blitzer, who has spoken with investigators about the case. “I definitely think it’s disappointing. But I have to take it on face value that they’ve run out all the leads on these guys and have come up cold.”

“I’m sure they’ve investigated these guys back to the day they were born: records checks, interviews with everybody that knew them, going back to old neighborhoods and co-workers.”

Blitzer said FBI agents have been sent back to the home countries of detainees to conduct investigations there, particularly of the four central suspects.

“I’m certain it has been intensive,” Blitzer said. “On anything related to this case, they’re obviously going to pull out all the stops and run down anything to gather information, to see who these guys are.”

The FBI’s investigation has been hampered by the recent anthrax outbreak, which diverted hundreds of agents from the case, and by the fact that none of the alleged attackers survived.

“The unfortunate thing is that a lot of the people involved in this are dead--19 of them,” one government official said.

And investigators’ inability to get any of the prime suspects to talk has proved so frustrating that some observers outside the government have suggested the U.S. should consider torture as a means of ensuring cooperation. U.S. authorities say they are not pursuing that option.

All four of the prime suspects are being held as material witnesses. They have not been charged with any crimes in connection with the attacks.

Khan and Azmath, two Indian natives who had been living in New Jersey, were arrested in Fort Worth on Sept. 12. They had boarded an Amtrak train when their cross-country flight from Newark, N.J., to San Antonio was grounded in St. Louis just after the hijackings.

Authorities said they found box cutters, more than $5,000 in cash and hair dye on the two men, who initially drew the suspicion of police when they paid cash for their train tickets.

Authorities’ suspicions increased when it appeared that at least one of the men had wired large amounts of cash back to India despite earning relatively meager wages as the manager of a magazine stand at a train depot.

Al-Marabh, a Kuwaiti-born man who had worked in Boston as a cabdriver, was arrested on an unrelated warrant outside Chicago. Authorities said he was associated with Raed Hijazi, a suspected Bin Laden operative who is imprisoned in Jordan in connection with a terrorist plot aimed at killing American tourists there.

Moussaoui, the fourth prime suspect, first aroused suspicion when he reportedly told flight instructors in Minnesota that he only wanted to learn how to fly a plane, not to take off or land. They called authorities and he was detained in August on immigration charges.

Suspicion of Moussaoui intensified after it was learned that French authorities had put him on a watch list of Islamic extremist groups. He was suspected of being the missing 20th hijacker because he had been taken into custody before the plot was carried out. U.S. authorities believe 20 men were meant to participate, in part because three of the planes carried five alleged hijackers while there were only four hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.

But on Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller said Moussaoui actually told flight school officials just the opposite of what had been reported--that he only wanted to learn to take off and land commercial jets, not fly them. Mueller said the FBI no longer considered Moussaoui to be the 20th hijacker.

Even with Mueller’s assertion, authorities say they will continue to investigate Moussaoui and the others still being held in custody.

“We’re just hopeful to get at the truth,” one official said.