Officials Say U.S. Embassy in Paris Target for Attack

Intensifying their efforts to identify extremists who may be part of a worldwide network targeting the United States, European authorities said Saturday that they discovered suspected bomb-making chemicals in an apartment above a North African restaurant in Brussels. Two men were arrested, and officials said terrorists planned to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris.

The discovery, part of a crackdown on a network with suspected ties to Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, comes after a slew of other terrorism-related arrests in recent days in France, Britain, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere.

In the U.S., despite rumors of a new round of attacks planned for Saturday, the day passed uneventfully. “Every hour that something doesn’t go on . . . there’s relief,” a senior law enforcement official in Washington said Saturday, as authorities remained on heightened alert.

The spotlight was trained on Boston, the departure city for two of the doomed planes in the Sept. 11 hijacks, because Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft had called the Boston mayor and the Massachusetts acting governor last week to warn of a possible weekend attack.

Authorities in Boston sought to dismiss the threat as unsubstantiated, but a law enforcement source said Saturday that the Justice Department’s unusual warning was based in part on a National Security Agency “intercept” of a conversation in the Middle East.

In the days immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the intercept picked up “chatter” from a consulate or diplomatic office in an unidentified Muslim nation in the Middle East in which people apparently were discussing rumors about a pending explosion Sept. 22--Saturday--in Boston, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the intercept.

The intercepted conversation was another sign of how aggressively U.S. intelligence officials now are seeking to collect information from the Middle East through electronic and other high-tech means. On the day of the attacks on New York City and Arlington, Va., electronic intercepts also showed Bin Laden associates reporting over airwaves that they had hit two targets.

The meaning of the conversation regarding the supposed Boston plot “wasn’t totally clear. It was innuendo,” the source cautioned.

But the communication, coupled with other evidence that possible associates of the hijackers had booked travel for Saturday, exacerbated concerns about a possible second attack. And Justice Department officials say they want to err on the side of caution in putting out word concerning all possible threats, even if they are uncorroborated.

With rumor sometimes turning to near hysteria about the threat of another attack, the day was met with defiance and trepidation in hot spots on the East Coast.

In Boston, about 20,000 people showed up for a religious revival in front of City Hall.

But in New York City, Isma Poulos, 32, said she took the bus into Manhattan on Saturday morning because of rumors of another attack. She wanted to avoid the train because it went into Grand Central Station, the site of bomb threats since the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Something’s supposed to happen [Saturday], but no one knows when or where,” Poulos said.

Indeed, officials said Saturday they have gathered stronger evidence that additional hijacks might have been planned for Sept. 11, because investigators found box cutters in two other planes flying out that day. Two of the knives were found in seat cushions on a plane out of Boston and another was found in the trash bin on an Atlanta plane, a Justice Department official said in confirming a report in Saturday’s Washington Post.

Authorities are pursuing a range of possible connections between the hijackers and a network of European terrorists that came under investigation even before the attacks on the U.S.

Investigators in Europe say the network has ties to Bin Laden and, according to news reports Saturday, there also could be ties to a jailed French Moroccan suspect in the United States who is suspected of plotting to take part in the hijacks.

In the suspected plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris, Belgian police said they discovered 220 pounds of sulfur and 13 gallons of acetone during a raid late Thursday. Two men were arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy.

The chemicals are linked to Islamic militants who were arrested in the Netherlands and Belgium days after the U.S. hijacks in connection with the alleged plot against the embassy in Paris. Those men are charged with intent to use explosive materials, criminal conspiracy and other crimes, and reportedly had suspicious maps and documents related to the chemicals in their possession.

In addition, police in Paris on Friday rounded up seven more suspects during predawn raids in working-class suburbs. The judge who ordered those raids--Jean Louis Brugiere, a veteran anti-terrorism specialist--flew to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on Friday to question an alleged Bin Laden associate considered the key figure in the European network.

The suspect, Jamal Beghal, was arrested in July and is said to have trained at Bin Laden terrorist camps in Afghanistan. His arrest led French police to the other suspects, whom French intelligence agents have shadowed for weeks, as they conducted reconnaissance on the embassy, according to authorities.

U.S. authorities have declined to comment about the suspected plot to attack U.S. interests in France except to say that they have full confidence in French investigators.

In another development, a British newspaper reported that two of the men arrested in Friday’s raids in Paris had contact with Habib Zacarias Moussaoui, the French Moroccan arrested in Minnesota in August while studying at a flight school. Subsequent investigation has led U.S. and French investigators to suspect that Moussaoui might have been the 20th hijacker meant to carry out one of the suicide missions had he not been in custody.

Meanwhile, CNN reported that the U.S. government will put up nearly $25 million in reward money for information leading to the arrests of those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. The money will come from the State Department’s share of emergency funds approved to assist in recovery efforts and to upgrade security.

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Rotella reported from Paris. Times staff writers Josh Meyer and Eric Slater contributed to this report.