Suspicion of Murder Adds to Terror Case

Investigators probing possible terrorist connections in Memphis, Tenn., have concluded that a woman charged with helping five Middle Eastern men get fake licenses was probably murdered when her car burst into flames along a rural highway, officials said Thursday.

Even as officials in Washington announced that six suspected Al Qaeda associates were in custody overseas, the dramatic developments in Tennessee fueled new questions about possible terrorist links within the United States.

Forensic tests in the Memphis case revealed gasoline on the clothing of Katherine Smith, 49, and on the passenger side of her car, which ran off the road early Sunday and hit a light pole, said Phil Thomas, special agent in charge of the Memphis office of the FBI.

Smith, who was burned beyond recognition, had been due to appear in federal court the next day in a detention hearing for five co-defendants in a fraud case. A driver’s license examiner for the state of Tennessee, she had allegedly helped the five obtain fake driver’s licenses.

Smith’s suspicious death comes amid an investigation by the FBI into whether her five co-defendants may have “connections” to terrorism. Authorities say one of the five drove from New York City to Memphis on Sept. 11, while a second man had in his wallet a temporary pass from the World Trade Center dated Sept. 5.

“It’s too early to say what their tie-ins may or may not be,” Thomas said in an interview. “But we’re checking their names and their pedigrees” against databases on terrorism suspects to determine if there are any matches.

Defense attorneys insist that the five are being linked to terrorism only because they are Middle Eastern, and they point out that the men--who remain in custody in Memphis--were locked up when Smith was killed and could not have been involved.

It is now clear, however, that Smith was not killed in an auto accident, Thomas said.

Investigators have not ruled out the possibility of suicide, Thomas said, but he acknowledged that the manner in which Smith died would be an unusual method to take one’s life.

The more likely scenario, he said, is murder.

“It is suspicious, due to the physical evidence of the car,” Thomas said. “This is not your usual accident. We’ve had several fire marshals come in and say the burn pattern looks more like an arson.”

Investigators say that the fuel tank of the car did not explode, and the 1992 Acura Legend suffered only minimal damage when it ran into a ditch and hit the light pole about 12:45 a.m. Sunday on U.S. 72 in Fayette County. Several eyewitnesses indicated that the car was already in flames when it ran off the road.

There are no immediate suspects, Thomas said, but “we’re pursuing all investigative leads.”

Meanwhile, authorities in Washington narrowed the pool of suspects wanted in connection with an urgent warning about possible attacks against Americans, perhaps in Yemen.

The FBI late Monday issued an urgent alert to 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide, warning them to be on the lookout for Yemeni national Fawaz Yahya Al-Rabeei and 16 associates who may have been planning terrorist attacks this week.

On Thursday, the agency said that six of the associates whose photos were released “have been located overseas.” Law enforcement officials who asked not to be identified said that all six were taken into custody in Yemen before Monday’s warning.

FBI officials said that putting out alerts about suspects who, it turned out, were already in custody represented not an intelligence failure but rather an “abundance of caution.”

“These guys use many aliases, and it was just a matter of tracking them down and getting out all the information that we could as quickly as we could,” one official said.

Because there was the possibility of an attack within 24 hours of Monday night’s warning, another official said, “we didn’t want to wait to confirm their identities.”