Hijacker May Have Met With Iraqi Spy

The federal investigation into the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon widened Tuesday to include the possibility that more than four airliners were to have been hijacked.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said, “We are not able at this time to confirm” that more planes were targeted in the plot. But another top law enforcement official said, “We think there were other [terrorist] teams out there. Maybe they got cold feet.”

Investigators also want to know more about an alleged meeting earlier this year in Europe between hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer.

A U.S. source cautioned that the meeting did not necessarily mean that Iraq was involved in the attacks.

“There’s no reason to believe at this point that it was in any way connected, but you can’t rule it out,” said one U.S. official who asked not to be identified. “It’s something that needs to be looked at. The bottom line is, we just don’t know.”

But the fact that a meeting occurred means the U.S. should “not focus only on Osama bin Laden,” the prime suspect behind the attacks, said Steven Emerson, an expert on Islamic jihad groups.

William M. Baker, former head of the FBI’s criminal investigative division, said it is increasingly clear that some state-sponsored intelligence service or a co-opted part of one had a role in the terrorist strikes. He based his thesis on the “sophistication, length of the operation and coordination” involved in the multiple hijacks, and said he would “sure be looking at” the intelligence services of such states as Iraq and Pakistan, among others.

In other developments Tuesday:

* Ashcroft announced that he has given U.S. immigration officials the power to hold detainees as long as 48 hours--from 24 hours previously--to give authorities more time to identify suspects and trace their activities.

Civil libertarians and Arab Americans immediately decried the move as an unnecessary infringement on immigrants’ rights.

* Authorities continue to scour the country and points abroad for anyone who might be a conspirator. So far, a handful of people are being held as material witnesses in the case, and 75 others are being detained on immigration violations.

It was learned, for instance, that authorities are holding a man suspected of providing financial aid to at least two of the hijackers who were living in San Diego.

A federal law enforcement source said agents filed court papers seeking to have the man held as a material witness in the investigation into last week’s terrorist attacks on the trade center and the Pentagon.

While the man is not directly implicated in the attacks, the source said, the man was in a position to have a great deal of information.

“This guy would have to be extremely naive . . . not to know what was going on,” the source said.

Atta’s relative importance to the network of terror cells involved in the attack seemed to grow with each of the latest disclosures.

He traveled to Europe at least twice earlier this year, both times to or through Spain. In January, he flew from Miami to Madrid and returned six days later. In July, he took a 12-day trip abroad, returning to the U.S. on a July 19 flight from Madrid to Atlanta.

Law enforcement documents also reveal that Atta booked passage for Oct. 13 on a Delta Air Lines flight from Baltimore to San Francisco. Like the Sept. 11 flights that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it was a transcontinental nonstop flight. The tickets could indicate that a contingency plan was in place should last week’s plot have had to be called off.

The documents also disclosed that investigators found a trail of wire fund transfers involving Atta and a previously unidentified associate. Two fund transfers for undisclosed amounts occurred Sept. 8 and Sept. 9, just days before the attacks.

Two safety deposit boxes at a Miami Bank of America branch were rented under the name of Atta’s fellow hijacker, Abdulaziz Alomari.

More records indicate that sometime during the previous 15 months, Atta and at least two other hijackers made a trip to Las Vegas.

FBI Seeking 190 for Questioning

Meanwhile, authorities have refused to identify the names of the handful of people who are being held on material witness warrants, as a federal grand jury in White Plains, N.Y., is gearing up to work with prosecutors.

“There have been no arrests so far directly related to [the Sept. 11] attacks,” said Mindy Tucker, chief spokeswoman at the Justice Department. “The investigation has focused on learning the full extent of damages from [the attacks], how the terrorism was financed and whether any other events were planned.”

Other federal law enforcement sources said the indications are that some of those being held are cooperating with authorities, because otherwise criminal charges or indictments would have been forthcoming.

Information about the arrests is being tightly controlled, and it is difficult to get a full picture of the significance of the moves so far.

“I have some idea these were collaborators at some level, and they might be willing to be singing like birds now,” one top official said. “That’s why you arrest them as material witnesses.

“We are trying to build our case and sell it to the rest of the world. And so this government is telling them, ‘You have a choice. You’re either a witness or a defendant.’ ”

The FBI quickened the pace of its investigation Tuesday, with the number of people it is seeking to find and question growing to more than 190.

Among that number are about 50 who have taken flight lessons, mostly in Florida.

Several of the men identified as hijackers shared residences and telephone numbers in South Florida, records show. Several also used the same credit cards. Documents indicate that a single Visa credit card was used by Atta and Alomari, who were both aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the Los Angeles-bound flight from Boston that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

And Ashcroft, in a move underscoring the urgency of new anti-terrorism efforts, adopted an emergency measure that will allow the Immigration and Naturalization Service to keep suspects in custody for a full 48 hours.

The interim Justice Department order directing the move states that the previous 24-hour period “is not mandated by constitutional principles” and that the longer custody period will allow investigators time to “establish an alien’s true identity” and check international databases to track relevant information.

Determining true identities has been a recurring problem in the terrorist probe, because many of the 19 suspected hijackers and their associates wanted for questioning had similar names, and many are thought to have used fake IDs and aliases to enter the country.

Ashcroft’s order appears to allow the INS to waive the 48-hour period altogether in an “emergency or other extraordinary circumstance,” giving the INS the ability to keep a suspect in custody indefinitely without charging him.

A law enforcement official who asked not to be identified said Ashcroft plans to invoke the emergency clause in the terrorist investigation to lock up some of the suspects indefinitely.

“As long as we feel these people pose a threat, we want to keep them in custody. This provision allows us to do that,” the official said.

Civil liberties advocates and Arab American leaders, who met Tuesday with Justice Department officials, were unconvinced, and said the 48-hour rule could be the first step toward robbing minorities of civil rights.

Hussein Ibish, a spokesman for the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, said he thinks the immigration change should be temporary.

“It’s troubling to think that immigrant rights would be severely curtailed. But given the extraordinary circumstances, this particular move strikes me as within the bounds of the plausible.”

The FBI did send out a bulletin to police and fire agencies stating that agents received information that terrorists’ plans “may include theft of fire department and emergency services vehicles for use as car bombs in attacks against military installations.”

The bureau said the threat was deemed “credible,” but later cautioned that “this information should be treated as raw and unevaluated intelligence and not as a credible threat.”

Emergency Vehicles Will Be Secured

Many fire departments took the matter seriously.

In Las Vegas, which is near Nellis Air Force Base, Steve La-Sky of the Clark County Fire Department said, “We’re not going to leave any vehicles unattended or unlocked.

“We’re going to be keeping all our bay doors closed, and the doors to the fire stations locked. Any visitor to the station will be announced and escorted. Any sort of suspicious activity will immediately be reported to the respective battalion chief.”

But in Fairfield, Calif., home of Travis Air Force Base, Fire Chief Ron Tougas said he took the FBI bulletin to be little more than a “rumor.”

He said the only vehicle ever stolen from his department was a pickup taken 25 years ago, and it was recovered the same day.

In Los Angeles, dozens of subpoenas have been issued in recent days by a federal grand jury, a law enforcement source said Tuesday.

“There are a lot of tentacles to this thing across the country, and everyone is trying to gather as much information as they can,” the source said.

Armed with subpoenas, FBI agents in Southern California are focusing in part on obtaining training records for students who used Boeing flight simulators.

In Corona del Mar, the bureau delivered a subpoena for student records to Robert Pastore, 58, a commercial pilot who ran the now-defunct Avia Training. The subpoena requested all student names and training dating back to 1996. An agent left with two cardboard boxes of documents, which included photocopies of driver’s licenses and passports for about 200 students, Pastore said.

Agents also have visited flight schools clustered around John Wayne Airport in Orange County. Officials at Sunrise Aviation handed over a foot-high stack of student records Monday to federal investigators, said Pam Hengsteler, a flight instructor at the school.

Residents of a middle-class Scottsdale, Ariz., neighborhood said FBI agents have been going door to door, asking if anyone has information about suspected hijacker Hani Hanjour.

An FBI agent told residents that records show that in 1996 and 1997, Hanjour rented a room in one of the neighborhood’s homes. “It was sort of a boardinghouse and, from about 1992 to 1999, a lot of the renters appeared to be young Arab men,” said Bob Gross, who lives across the street.

Times staff writers Julie Cart, David Colker, Rich Connell, Ken Ellingwood, Tom Gorman, Jon Healey, Peter Y. Hong, Robert L. Jackson, Greg Krikorian, Matt Lait, Robert J. Lopez, Jennifer Mena, Josh Meyer, Tim Reiterman, William C. Rempel, H.G. Reza, Kurt Streeter, John-Thor Dahlburg and Daniel Yi, and researchers Robert Patrick and Nona Yates contributed to this story.

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