‘Dirty’ Bomb Probe Widens

U.S. authorities overseas have interrogated a second suspect in the alleged Al Qaeda plot to detonate a radioactive bomb in America, officials said Tuesday, as investigators scrambled to determine if other accomplices are in the United States, Switzerland, Egypt or elsewhere.

U.S. officials also said the so-called “dirty” bomb plan apparently called for stealing radioactive material from a U.S. university laboratory or other American facility. Low-level nuclear isotopes are widely used in medicine, research and industry.

The plot, which was in its early stages, was foiled when CIA, FBI, Customs and State Department agents identified and tracked Jose Padilla--a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert who adopted the name Abdullah al Muhajir--in Cairo and Zurich, authorities said. He was arrested May 8 when he flew from Switzerland to Chicago on what officials called a scouting mission for a terrorist attack.

President Bush said Padilla was one of many “would-be killers” that the U.S. has captured, and that it is looking for many more.

“This guy Padilla’s one of many who we’ve arrested,” Bush said in a meeting in his Cabinet Room. “The coalition we’ve put together has hauled in 2,400 people. And you can call it 2,401 now. There’s just a full-scale manhunt on.... We will run down every lead, every hint. This guy Padilla’s a bad guy and he is where he needs to be: detained.”

Officials said Padilla has refused to cooperate since his arrest. After President Bush decided Sunday that Padilla should be held as an “enemy combatant” against the United States, rather than as a criminal defendant, he was flown in a military C-130 to a high-security Navy brig outside Charleston, S.C., where he has been isolated from other inmates and is under heavy military guard.

On Tuesday, Padilla’s lawyer said at a federal court hearing in New York that Padilla’s continued detention is a violation of the Constitution because he has not been charged and is being denied access to legal counsel. “My client is a citizen,” attorney Donna R. Newman told reporters. “He still has constitutional rights.”

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were given a closed-door briefing on the case Tuesday as part of their wide-ranging review into Sept. 11 intelligence failures. But some members came away with more questions than answers, a congressional source said.

“The concern we’d like to pursue is, what’s the substance of this? Not many people were satisfied that we had a whole hell of a lot” on Padilla in terms of hard evidence, the source said. “We’re all for sticking bad guys in the hole, but you’ve got to have evidence.”

A senior U.S. intelligence official said Pakistan had detained a second suspect in the plot last month. The official said the man, who has not been publicly identified but is from an Arab country, is being interrogated by U.S. authorities at an undisclosed location. There were conflicting reports as to whether Pakistan had handed the suspect over to U.S. authorities.

The second suspect traveled with Padilla to eastern Afghanistan last fall to meet Abu Zubeida, Al Qaeda’s operations chief, and later accompanied Padilla to secret meetings with other senior Al Qaeda leaders inside Pakistan to discuss the dirty-bomb proposal as well as potential attacks against hotels, gas stations and other targets, the official said.

Search for Accomplices

One of the most urgent aspects of the investigation is whether Padilla had other accomplices, particularly in the United States.

U.S. authorities do not believe Padilla acted alone or planned to carry out a major attack in the United States without help from others.

“He clearly had associates, and one of the things we want to ask him about is who those associates were and how we can track them down,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said on CBS’ “Early Show.”

With evidence indicating that the FBI and CIA missed early clues to the Sept. 11 attacks, members of Congress also pressed for assurances that Padilla had no other U.S. accomplices.

“That’s one of the big questions,” a congressional investigator said.

An FBI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said an aggressive investigation had yet to find any American accomplices but that the probe is continuing. Investigators also are checking to see if possible accomplices may have entered and left the country.

“That’s how they operate, so there is good reason to assume that may be the case here,” the FBI official said.

But a senior government official said investigators have found no co-conspirators despite pursuing a number of investigative leads. “I’m not picking up any sense that [investigators] believe anyone’s out there,” the official said. “They’re satisfied that there was no one else here.”

A Pattern Emerges

In other Al Qaeda plots, those actually carrying out the attacks often are met in a target city by other Al Qaeda operatives. They may provide safe houses, money, transportation, false documents and other logistical help, said the FBI official.

That was the case with Ahmed Ressam, who was convicted of plotting a millennium bombing with Al Qaeda. Ressam was supposed to drive a car laden with explosives from Canada into Washington state in December 1999 and ultimately plant a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport.

According to wiretaps and other evidence introduced at his trial last year, Ressam was to be met by another operative who had flown in from New York, as well as perhaps other co-conspirators in the Seattle area. After Ressam testified that several accomplices had helped him, two men were convicted in the case.

U.S. intelligence officials said they had not determined if Padilla was a seasoned Al Qaeda operative who had escaped detection until recently or a vagabond freelance agent who somehow made contact with senior Al Qaeda leaders last fall and was embraced by the group.

Padilla got his new passport in March, but the local consular official was concerned that Padilla might be involved in a case of identity theft.

“It was after the passport was issued [in March] that the consular officer just felt there was something odd about the case and raised it to the attention of the regional security officer, who looked into it and then reported to the other elements of the consulate, including the FBI,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Tuesday.

The discovery that Padilla had a long criminal record in Florida and Illinois led to questions about why he was in Pakistan. The information was forwarded to joint terrorism task forces, led by the FBI, in Miami and Chicago.

The investigation picked up steam after FBI and CIA agents, working with Pakistani authorities, captured Zubeida, the alleged operations chief for Al Qaeda, in a raid in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad on March 28.

During an interrogation in late April, Zubeida told U.S. authorities he was approached late last year at his hide-out in Khowst, in eastern Afghanistan, by an American and another man who proposed building a dirty bomb for use in the United States, according to intelligence officials.

“He didn’t identify him, or give a name, just a generic description of him,” one official said. “It was fairly sketchy information.”

It remains unclear how Padilla was able to find and meet Zubeida, a fugitive who was the focus of an intense manhunt by U.S. and allied forces at the height of the Afghan war last winter.

Zubeida may have escaped Afghanistan with Padilla at that point, the official said. Padilla is known to have traveled with Zubeida inside Pakistan early this year and spent time at an Al Qaeda site in Lahore, in eastern Pakistan, to learn how to wire explosives and to study radiological dispersal devices on the Internet. In March, Padilla met with other Al Qaeda leaders in Karachi to further discuss his plan.

Interrogations Pay Off

After interrogating other Al Qaeda prisoners detained at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and checking immigration and other documents, the CIA and other agencies quickly identified Padilla and the second suspect.

Agents then took passport photos of the two men back to Zubeida for confirmation. “He was surprised, but he said, ‘Yes, that’s them,’ ” an intelligence official said.

By then, however, Padilla was gone. Pakistan had briefly detained him and his accomplice for using false travel documents this spring. But he was released after several days and left Karachi for Zurich in early April.

“He wasn’t known as Al Qaeda,” the intelligence official said. “He was just allowed to go.”

Padilla subsequently flew to Egypt, where authorities believe he has a wife and several children. U.S. intelligence caught up with him there and are still seeking to determine if he had contacts with Egyptian supporters of Al Qaeda.

“At some point, in the middle of this process, we pick him up in Cairo,” the intelligence official said. “After that he was under constant surveillance.”

FBI and other agents trailed him in Cairo and then back to Zurich, where they made sure Swiss authorities closely checked his baggage and shoes--in case he sought to emulate accused “shoe bomber” Richard C. Reid--before he boarded a Swissair flight from Zurich to Chicago on May 8.

About six FBI agents, and an equal number of Swiss law enforcement officers, secretly watched Padilla on the flight home, monitoring his every move.

“There were an awful lot of people on that flight who could have prevented” anything from going wrong, said a U.S. law enforcement official. “We knew everything about the guy on that flight--where he was going to sit and everything else. I don’t think there was ever anybody in danger on that flight.”

Padilla told the FBI agents who arrested him at O’Hare that he had come to “see his son,” a source said.

Taking No More Risks

A senior government official said the FBI considered letting Padilla leave the airport and trailing him to see who he met, but decided it was not worth the chance of losing him.

Authorities believe that on one of his Switzerland trips, Padilla received some $10,000 in cash. The money was confiscated in Chicago, but authorities are trying to determine who gave it to him and where the money came from.

U.S. officials had faced months of resistance from Swiss officials who rejected the idea that terrorists were using their financial institutions. But they quickly came on board in the Padilla operation, officials said.

A senior U.S. official said the arrest, which involved the combined efforts of at least four U.S. agencies, reflects the “convergence of investigative strengths” developed since Sept. 11. Padilla’s life remains a focus of intense scrutiny.

Now 31, he and his family moved to Chicago when he was 4. His first arrest, for the brutal stabbing death of a local man, came when he was 14. At least four other arrests and two convictions for armed robbery and battery followed. He worked at restaurants and hotels when he wasn’t in jail.

In the fall of 1991, he jumped bail on a weapon charge and moved to South Florida.

He soon found himself in trouble again, charged with aggravated assault and carrying a concealed weapon. It was after serving 10 months in the Broward County Jail that the man raised as a Roman Catholic converted to radical Islam along with his future wife, Cherie Maria Stultz.

They both worked at a Taco Bell restaurant in Davie, near Fort Lauderdale, close to about 20 Islamic centers or mosques. Padilla disappeared after two years and the couple later divorced.

U.S. officials now say Padilla had moved to Egypt by 1998. His goal, they said, was to further explore Muslim teachings and traditions. He stayed about two years, taking up with illegal underground mosques that preach extremist forms of Islam, officials said.

Authorities now are keen to find out who he met in Egypt, which has battled Islamic extremists for years, and how he ultimately gravitated toward a terrorist faction that vows to kill millions of Americans.

A Justice Department official said Padilla “definitely seemed to be seeking out over time a more radical view.”

Ultimately, even the underground mosques did not satisfy him, and teachers he met in Egypt pointed him to still more extreme factions in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the official said.

“Once he was there [in Egypt], he didn’t feel like it was going far enough, so he went to Pakistan and Afghanistan,” the official said. “There was this progression with his growing radical extremism.”

Eric Slater in Chicago, John-Thor Dahlburg in Fort Lauderdale, Anna M. Virtue in Miami and Robin Wright in Washington also contributed to this report.