Apparent Student Pilot Arrested in Missouri

A Saudi man who apparently holds a student pilot’s license was arrested in Missouri on a bank fraud charge, and a fellow Saudi who once took flight lessons in Alabama pleaded not guilty to lying on his visa application, as the nationwide terror investigation progressed Monday.

The FBI has not tied Adel F. Badri, arrested in Missouri, to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. An attorney for the other man, Khalid Al-Draibi, who appeared in a federal court in Virginia, said Al-Draibi has passed a lie-detector test about the attacks but is still under investigation.

Al-Draibi, 32, pleaded not guilty to providing false statements on a visa application and lying to police about being a U.S. citizen.

Separately, it was disclosed that a Jersey City, N.J., man detained after the attacks has been charged with lying to an FBI agent about checks he wrote and deposited in his bank account.

Mohammad Pervez lived with two other detainees, Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan. Investigators have taken particular interest in those two men because they were detained in Fort Worth the day after the attacks, carrying hair dye, about $5,000 in cash and box cutters.

Pervez was accused of lying when he said he didn’t know about certain checks and money orders that moved in and out of his bank account, according to an Oct. 16 complaint filed by the FBI in U.S. District Court in New York.

Missouri police arrested Badri and charged him with bank fraud for cashing allegedly forged checks worth $10,000, according to an FBI affidavit.

The checks were written on an account at Chevy Chase Bank in Maryland that had been closed. According to the FBI, the closed account’s holder was Fatmah Ibrahim, a woman who Badri said lives in Virginia and works for a “specific organization in Washington, D.C.” Authorities tracked down the unidentified organization and found no record of the woman, and a forgery expert said Badri wrote the checks, the FBI said.

Federal Aviation Administration records show a person named Adel F. Badri was certified as a student pilot in the FAA’s eastern region covering the District of Columbia and Maryland, Virginia and other Atlantic seaboard states.

Some of the 19 hijackers suspected of crashing four planes on Sept. 11 had U.S. pilots’ licenses or took flight lessons in the U.S.

The FBI affidavit does not say if Badri had links to the attacks. The Justice Department’s practice is to release court records about cases that come up in the terror probe. A hearing will be held today in federal court in Kansas City.