18 Men Identified as the Hijackers

As they intensified their pursuit of terrorists responsible for the airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, authorities said Thursday that they had arrested a suspect in Germany and learned the identities of the 18 men who hijacked the planes.

American and European officials said they believe that the terrorists belonged to isolated cells acting in concert not only with Osama bin Laden but also with groups linked to one or more foreign governments.

“In this order,” said one top-ranking U.S. law enforcement official who specializes in international intelligence: “Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq.”

“We can’t believe it’s just one man or just one organization,” said another senior federal law enforcement official. “There is no one person responsible.”

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that Bin Laden, a Saudi fugitive believed to run a terrorist network from Afghanistan, remains a prime suspect.

“We are looking at those terrorist organizations who have the kind of capacity to conduct the kind of attack that we saw,” Powell said at a news conference. Asked whether he was referring to Bin Laden, he replied: “Yes.”

The hijackers commandeered four jetliners Tuesday and steered two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and a third into one of the five sides of the Pentagon outside Washington. The fourth crashed in western Pennsylvania. Casualties are expected to exceed 5,000 deaths.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft told reporters that a total of 18 hijackers had seized the planes and that investigators had identified all of them. The FBI said five were on each of two planes, with four each on the other two. The Department of Justice planned to release their names and photographs Thursday night but decided not to, saying its list was not ready.

The hijackers who died in the suicide missions were among as many as 30 who were recruited and were willing to die, officials said. At least 20 additional infiltrators are believed to have played supporting roles.

In other developments:

* Investigators said they suspect that terrorists might have been planning to hijack a fifth plane, perhaps in Dallas. Two men were detained in Fort Worth for questioning after they were found on an Amtrak train Wednesday night with box cutters--the same type of weapon used by some of the hijackers.

* A man carrying false pilot’s identification was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, and as many as six other people were detained. Some are Arab nationals, said New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. Kennedy and other New York-area airports, which had just reopened, were closed to takeoffs.

* Officials said that they had found the “black box” flight data recorder from the plane that hit the Pentagon but that they could not reach it in the still-smoldering rubble. Searchers have been unable so far to find the data recorders from the jets that reduced the World Trade Center to ruins.

Assessing the scope of the conspiracy, three federal authorities said the suicidal air assaults probably were carried out by small terrorist cells whose individual members did not even know that other planes would be hijacked and other targets struck at the same time.

Officials said they also believe that a dozen or more of the terrorists’ handlers remain in this country, even though it is likely that many of the hijackers’ family members and associates left the country in the days before the Tuesday morning assaults.

Authorities said they believe that the Bin Laden organization could not have mounted the attacks on its own because of their intricacy and cost and the difficulties inherent in recruiting enough suitable participants.

The officials said the operation’s scope would have required its leaders to turn to militant groups in Iran and Iraq for assistance. Bin Laden’s followers and allies have sought help from those and other countries in the past.

For instance, authorities now believe that Lebanon’s Hezbollah extremist movement gave Bin Laden’s followers equipment used in the suicide boat attack last fall against the guided missile destroyer Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden.

Hezbollah, in turn, receives much of its support and materiel from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. That materiel arrives in irregular air shipments from Iran to Syria. Similar support, officials say, might have been critical to Tuesday’s attacks.

Acting on an FBI tip that at least two of the hijackers had been living in Hamburg, Germany, police searched eight apartments in the city, arrested a suspect and took a young woman in for questioning.

Two of those on passenger lists for the commandeered flights--Marwan Schehhi, 23, and Mohammed Atta, 33--held legal residence permits for two of the apartments since January, said Olaf Scholz, a Hamburg security official.

Both men, who are assumed to have died in the crashes, were born in the United Arab Emirates, according to the city’s Central Registry of Foreigners, which listed them as electronics students at Hamburg’s Technical University.

The suspected terrorists lived in Florida from mid-2000 until early this year, taking flight courses at Huffman Aviation International in Venice, police said. They and at least one other man who frequented the apartments are believed to have left Germany for the United States in May, Scholz said.

Authorities were searching for the third man, thought to be closely associated with the alleged hijackers.

The man arrested at one of the apartments, who has not been identified by name, age or nationality, was an employee at Hamburg International Airport, said Hamburg Police Chief Gerhard Mueller. He did not specify what the man did at the international terminal, saying only that he had “an interesting profession.”

One of the apartments searched appeared to have been uninhabited for months and to have undergone some renovations, complicating the search for evidence, police spokesman Reinhard Fallak said.

Germany’s chief federal prosecutor, Kay Nehm, said the domestic intelligence service was investigating the activities of the Hamburg tenants.

“They are being investigated on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization, murder and launching an attack on air traffic,” Nehm said. “We suspect that at least since the start of this year, these people lived in Hamburg.

“These people were of Arabic background and lived in Hamburg and were Islamic fundamentalists, and they formed a terrorist organization with the aim of launching spectacular attacks on institutions in the United States,” Nehm said.

No evidence directly connecting the Hamburg figures to Bin Laden is known to have been found.

In Manila, U.S. and Philippine investigators raided the Bayview Park Hotel, near the U.S. Embassy. No arrests were made. In 1995, a suspect in a 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center was taken into custody at the same hotel.

Italian police, meanwhile, reopened an investigation into an April incident in which thieves stole a uniform, a badge, two U.S. passports and other documents from two American Airlines pilots in Rome. The badge could be used for access to offices of the airline in airports worldwide.

Bill Baker, former head of the FBI’s criminal division and its counterintelligence operation, said that it is “increasingly obvious” that funds, personnel and other resources were channeled to the terrorists from foreign states.

“I know all the talk right now is of cells and terrorists in those cells. But to me, this seems to show some state involvement,” he said in an interview.

The large number of hijackers was needed for several reasons--to keep the crew and passengers at bay and to protect the terrorists who took the controls in the cockpits.

“Why so many?” said Baker. “To protect the [terrorist] pilot, to surround the pilot and protect him, so you don’t have what happened in Pennsylvania.” Passengers in the plane that crashed there are believed to have fought the hijackers and prevented them from reaching targets in the Washington area.

Officials believe that more than one of the hijackers on each plane had received some training on how to pilot large aircraft, and officials continued to focus their attention on private flight schools in Venice, Vero Beach, Pompano Beach and Daytona Beach--all in Florida.

Agents believe there were individual cells operating out of each location, with members under the control of handlers living nearby.

They said they do not think that members of one cell were aware that their confederates were receiving similar training.

“It would keep one leak from disrupting the whole scenario,” Baker said. “What also is interesting to me is how this was kept under wraps, if they were over here training” for a suicide mission. “Why didn’t a wife or a spouse say something? Culturally, we’re going to have to really get a grasp of that.”

Baker said it is highly probable that all of the hijackers assigned to each aircraft might not have met one another until shortly before they assembled at the airports.

“You don’t want to give out all of the operational information, even to the key people who will pilot the planes,” he said. “The pilots would need to know only what his flight is and what his target is, but not the other flights or targets.”

That kind of secrecy, officials said, prevented individuals from knowing too much about the activities of higher-ups, in case they turned against them.

With so many people playing so many roles in this complex network, supervisors would have thought it imperative to shield themselves and their superiors.

“We’re told that of the groups involved, some 30 were willing to die for this,” said one high government law enforcement official. “Many of them were overseers, making sure everything got done, and helped coordinate things on the ground.

“Whether they even used their real names with their recruits, we don’t know. Yet. Some of the hijackers had passports that appeared to be legitimate. But who knows what’s real yet? And we are obviously assuming that many of these people who are still here were here in the weeks and months and years before this happened. Where are they now?”

An FBI source said that those who stayed behind in this country along with the hijackers did so only to make sure the final preparations were carried out.

“Some people had to remain to make sure it went off OK,” he said. “Particularly with this kind of precision.”

Finding them will be difficult, he said.

“The warriors of this group were on the planes,” he said. “The others are harder to find, and that’s the difficulty here. They are going to lie low, clean up whatever trails they can, move, relocate, create a second set of ID.”

Investigators suspect that terrorists might have been planning to hijack a fifth plane, perhaps at the nation’s second-biggest airport in Dallas, law enforcement sources disclosed Thursday.

Two men were in federal custody at Fort Worth for questioning after they were discovered on an Amtrak train Wednesday night with box cutters.

The men allegedly entered the country with false immigration documents and might have been carrying large amounts of cash, along with ID papers marked “NYC.” Investigators are trying to determine whether the two men, 51-year-old Ayub Ali Khan and 47-year-old Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, both from India, had any connection to the 18 hijackers aboard the four doomed flights.

“There are a bunch of questions that need to be answered,” said Lt. Mack West of the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department in Fort Worth, which turned the men over to federal marshals Thursday. “We don’t know if there’s a connection, but of course you’re always worried about something like that. Passing through on a train, who knows if they intended to stop here or were they trying to get someplace else.”

*

Times staff writers Bob Drogin in Washington; Elizabeth Mehren in Boston; Edith Stanley in Atlanta; Carol J. Wiliams in Hamburg; Edward J. Boyer, Richard E. Meyer and Tim Rutten in Los Angeles contributed to this report.