Texas Muslims Draw FBI Scrutiny

The former leader of a mosque near Dallas was questioned for three hours here Wednesday about whether he knew any of the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

He is on a growing list of people with Texas ties who have come under scrutiny as authorities search the country for clues about who helped carried out the assaults.

The others include two men who were on a train passing through Fort Worth on the day of the attacks and a respected radiologist in San Antonio.

For Muslim leaders in Texas, the pressure is intense as the FBI sweeps through the state in search of people who may have aided or financed the hijackings that sent planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But the scrutiny, while heightened, is nothing new. In recent years the state has been the focus of several investigations into how Islamic militant groups obtain money, supplies and other support. Connections to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi expatriate named by President Bush as the “prime suspect” in the hijackings, have surfaced here.

Attorney Khalid Hamideh said investigators appear to have cast a wide net among Muslims in the Dallas area.

“Since Saturday, I’ve gotten no less than a dozen phone calls saying, ‘The FBI has asked to talk to me,” he said. “I’ve told everyone to talk to the FBI. They asked one of our leaders, ‘Can you be our eyes and ears in the community?’ ”

The Muslim cleric, Moataz Al-Hallak, was interviewed Wednesday by federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who earlier this year presented the government’s case against figures in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attacks also linked to Bin Laden.

Al-Hallak, who now lives in a Maryland suburb where five of the suspected hijackers apparently spent time a few weeks ago, denied any involvement in the attacks.

His lawyer, Stanley Cohen, said the imam was shown photographs of the 19 young men identified by the FBI as hijackers, and he did not recognize any of them.

“The Muslim community in Texas has drawn a lot of heat,’ Cohen said.

Indeed, his client and the prosecutor have met before. Al-Hallak testified three times under a grant of immunity before a federal grand jury in the embassy bombings case.

Elsewhere in the country, investigators are trying to flesh out a picture of the hijackers’ cells and the network of sympathizers who supported them. In Texas, authorities may have a head start on that work from previous cases.

The investigation into the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center turned up a Texas connection. From a telephone in Mesquite, an eastern suburb of Dallas, a man identified only as Mohammed allegedly arranged conference calls between plotters in New Jersey and New York.

Money Link to Hamas Is Probed

A Dallas grand jury has spent two years investigating whether locally raised money has been funneled to the militant Palestinian group Hamas. And Bin Laden’s former secretary, a resident of Arlington, another Dallas suburb, was convicted in May of conspiring to kill Americans in the embassy bombings.

The secretary, Wadih El-Hage, was a member of Al-Hallak’s former flock at the Islamic Society of Arlington.

Al-Hallak moved from Texas 13 months ago and now lives in Laurel, Md. But he was back in Texas on the day the hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A federal law enforcement source said Al-Hallak may have made statements predicting the attacks while he was visiting. Cohen said his client denies this.

During the embassy bombing trial in New York, Al-Hallak was described in court documents as an intermediary for Bin Laden operatives, according to newspaper accounts.

The documents said the imam introduced a pilot who prayed at the mosque to another worshiper who wanted to fly a used jet to the Middle East. The airplane later crashed in the Sudan while being used by a Bin Laden organization there.

An Egyptian resident of Arlington testified at the trial that El-Hage contacted him in Texas in 1993 and said that Bin Laden would pay $350,000 for a jet that could carry Stinger missiles from Pakistan to Sudan. The Egyptian listed Al-Hallak’s home address on sales documents, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Al-Hallak told the grand jury that he had merely been helping out two congregants, with no knowledge that any Bin Laden group was involved.

Federal authorities said Al-Hallak also knows Mohammed Abdo, an Arlington man now being questioned by the FBI in Dallas in connection with last week’s attacks.

Al-Hallak denies any involvement, past or present, in terrorist groups, Cohen said, adding that the FBI continued to investigate the Arlington mosque at least through 2000. He blamed an FBI agent for sowing dissension at the mosque that eventually drove Al-Hallak away.

Meanwhile, a federal grand jury continues to explore possible help in the Dallas area for Hamas, a Palestinian group linked to terrorism in Israel.

On Sept. 6, a terrorism task force served subpoenas on an Internet services company, InfoCom Corp. in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, based on a sealed affidavit.

A relative of InfoCom’s president is married to Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzook. She receives a monthly annuity from the company because she invested $250,000 in the firm in 1992, said Mark Enoch, an InfoCom lawyer.

A federal law enforcement source said it was too early to know whether probes of Hamas and last week’s terrorism will at some point intersect.

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Times researcher Robert Patrick contributed to this report.