FBI Finds Suicide Note; More Men Detained

In a curious note to a carefully planned and executed plot, one of the suspected hijackers left behind a piece of luggage in his Boston hotel room. Inside were airline uniforms, a video of commercial aircraft and a suicide note, records show.

The bag was left by Mohamed Atta, who is emerging as one of the suspected leaders in the terrorist takeover of four commercial jets that crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field last week.

The FBI has not revealed the contents of the suicide note. But an FBI document reveals details of the luggage contents and provides additional information about when and how some of the 19 suspected hijackers made their ticket reservations for the fatal flights in the weeks before the attacks.

Some used their Visa cards. Others paid cash. Two reserved tickets on the Internet on Aug. 25 for American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Two more booked reservations Aug. 26 for American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the World Trade Center. Two more bought tickets Aug. 27 for United Airlines Flight 175, the second plane to hit the World Trade Center.

Five suspected hijackers each purchased a one-way ticket. On the FBI document detailing the purchases, someone noted “1 Way Ticket!!” five different times.

As more details of the 19 suspected hijackers’ meticulous planning emerges, the FBI’s massive investigation enters its second week with growing pressure for agents to assemble a complete portrait of the hijackers and any associates they had in the United States.

“We now know who some of the people are,” said a high-level FBI official in Washington. “We don’t know near enough about them.

“There are other individuals out there, and you’d think we’d be able to catch them,” he said. “But you don’t know what kind of safe houses they have, if they have them. Who is providing them logistical support?

“You need time to put together where these guys have been and who they have associated with. These guys are very mobile, as evident in the number of houses they’ve had. They are not easy to track at all.”

Among the Leads: Knife, Man Held in Los Angeles

A handful of men are being held as material witnesses, and FBI Director Robert Mueller said Monday that an additional 49 people were being held on suspected immigration violations.

Among the leads under investigation:

* The FBI recovered a “badly damaged” commercially manufactured cigarette lighter with a concealed knife blade at the United Airlines Flight 93 crash scene in western Pennsylvania, according to a confidential FBI bulletin sent to law enforcement agencies Monday. The find could be significant because agents think the hijackers were armed with knives.

According to the advisory, a preliminary forensic examination of the lighter at an FBI lab revealed that it was about 2 3/4 inches long, with a knife blade of about 2 1/2 inches.

* A man being held in the Los Angeles County jail in Lancaster for possible immigration violations was transferred to the downtown federal detention center. Sheriff’s Capt. Gary Sinclair said the FBI wanted to question Tarek Mohamed Fayad, 33, because he may have once been a roommate of a suspected hijacker.

A “Fayad Tarek” appears on the list of people the FBI wants to interview. Federal agents Monday were at a Colton apartment complex, where records show a man by the name of Tarek M. Fayad lives.

Residents said Fayad lived in the apartments for at least 18 months. When he first moved in, Fayad lived with four or five other men. He sometimes took issue with people who criticized the United States, according to one resident.

Also Monday, a Los Angeles-area flight school said FBI agents late last week took copies of enrollment records for about 120 to 150 former students, almost all of whom are Egyptian. They had attended Air Desert Pacific during the last three years, said Mark Webster, the school’s general manager. He said none of the 19 suspected hijackers identified by the FBI attended his school.

* A confidential FBI list of possible associates of the suspected hijackers includes five people who appear to have reservations on a Sept. 22 United Airlines flight from San Antonio to Denver, including a man taken into custody after the attacks and being questioned by a counter-terrorism task force in New York. The flight this Saturday has been canceled, but airline officials said it was for business not security reasons.

“We are working closely with the FBI and will not release any information related to the investigation,” said United Airlines spokeswoman Jenna Ludgate. “It will be irresponsible for us to do so.”

But a source familiar with the probe said the investigation into the San Antonio-Denver flight was in early stages, and agents aren’t even sure who the five people are and how old they might be.

Authorities have taken into custody Alader Alhazmi, a 34-year-old medical student from San Antonio whose name matches one on one of the five reservations. FBI agents copied information from his records at the University of Texas Health Science Center last week, school officials said.

“We are cooperating with the authorities to the fullest extent possible,” said Dr. Francisco Cigarroa, president of the health center. “It is shocking that the tentacles of this tragedy could reach all the way to South Texas.”

* One federal official said authorities are “most intrigued” by two men taken off an Amtrak train in Fort Worth last week. Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath had boarded a flight to San Antonio on Tuesday morning at the Newark, N.J., airport, from where one of the hijacked planes departed. But the San Antonio flight was diverted to St. Louis because of the World Trade Center attacks, and the two men then boarded the train to Texas.

Sources said Khan and Azmath were found with box cutters, similar to the weapons reportedly used by the hijackers, and several thousand dollars. They have not been officially linked to the hijacking plot, however.

“All that cash and those cutters, we need to know what that’s all about,” said one FBI law enforcement source in Washington.

* In Germany, police on Monday asked the chancellor of the Technical University in Hamburg to examine a list of 13 names to determine whether any had been students there. Among the 13 were two men identified by the FBI as suspected hijackers. A third was a student who left Germany for Pakistan earlier this month.

German police have searched 15 apartments in Hamburg and two in Bochum, a city in the Ruhr River valley, since last week. The Bochum searches were prompted by a Turkish woman’s report that her Lebanese boyfriend, Ziad Jarrahi, was missing. Jarrahi, 26, was among those believed to have hijacked United Airlines Flight 93.

* In Denver, University of Colorado officials said Monday they were working with federal authorities to determine whether two of the suspected hijackers attended school there.

A student named Abdulaziz Alomari, the same name as one of the suspected hijackers, graduated last year with an undergraduate degree in engineering. Another student with the same name as a hijacker, Ahmed Alghamdi, attended summer classes at the university from 1998 to 2000, university counsel Joanne McDevitt said.

* Mexican immigration officials said they had taken into custody a man identified as Abdel Salem Imal, 26, near the Piedras Negras border crossing for carrying apparently false identification indicating Brazilian nationality. Police searching Imal’s baggage became suspicious after finding telephone numbers for Afghanistan, New York, Canada and Germany and separate identification showing a different name, Imad Mohammed Abed.

Motorists at several border crossings are waiting as long as two to three hours because of intensified inspections following the hijackings.

* The FBI office in Dallas reported Monday that two men, Mohammed Abdo and Anwar Al Marabi, were arrested over the weekend on immigration violations and were now being questioned in connection with the attacks.

FBI Special Agent Lori Bailey said the agency is continuing to search for more than 175 people whose names appear on an ever-changing list of possible associates of the suspected hijackers.

That list, Bailey said, includes the names of people who were flying last Tuesday and others “developed as a result of the totality of our investigation.”

FBI Hopes Witnesses Will Cooperate

A senior FBI official said the fate of the material witnesses hinges on their level of cooperation with authorities.

“When we get them to a grand jury and they invoke the 5th Amendment [against self-incrimination], you can be sure we are going to continue to hold them,” he said. “But if they cooperate and help us, it’s a different story. So they dictate to a large degree what happens, and that’s part of what all needs to be sorted out.”

Another high-level FBI official in Washington cautioned that, while the public may be growing impatient that there have been no major arrests in the case, “there is a lot being done behind the scenes.”

He said law enforcement is working to beef up security at airports and at high-rise public structures, while also meticulously building a chronology on the lives of the suspected hijackers.

The FBI document shows that two of the suspected hijackers on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon bought their tickets at Baltimore International Airport on Sept. 5 with cash. That would suggest that the men, Khalid Al-Midhar and Majed Moqed, were in the Washington metropolitan area the week before the crash.

*

Times staff writers Josh Meyer in New York; Matt Lait, Robert Lopez, Greg Krikorian, Rich Connell, Scott Glover, Beth Shuster, Douglas Haberman, Buck Wargo, Nadra Kareem, Gene Maddaus and Jon Healey in Los Angeles; Eric Lichtblau and Judy Pasternak in Washington; Chris Kraul in Mexico City; and Julie Cart in Denver contributed to this story.