Officials: Plot included additional hijackings
Several hijackers separately wired thousands of dollars to the same man in the Middle East hours before leaving Boston last week on suicide flights into the World Trade Center, which authorities now believe were part of a cross-country plot involving plans for additional hijackings.
The last-minute transfers of cash are among several new leads investigators are pursuing that could provide key financial links between the terrorists and associates overseas. In a related development, police in Germany said they are seeking a former college roommate of two of the hijackers who is believed to have handled many of their logistical arrangements, including renting apartments and applying for U.S. visas.
Those hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, are two of the three who each made Western Union wire transfers, totaling more than $10,000, to the United Arab Emirates, according to FBI documents. Atta made two transfers on Sept. 8 and 9, while Al-Shehhi and another hijacker, Waleed Al-Shehri, made theirs shortly before boarding the two doomed flights that left Boston on Sept. 11.
The recipient of the wires, whose Arabic name is spelled several different ways in the documents, is one of almost 200 people the FBI is seeking in a global dragnet for suspects and potential witnesses. A lengthy list of names being circulated to police agencies across the country shows that investigators have flagged 60 commercial flights that were scheduled to be taken by some people on the list in coming weeks.
Only one of the flights -- a now-cancelled United Airlines flight from San Antonio to Denver next Saturday -- appears to fit the pattern used by the 19 hijackers, who worked in teams of four or five to commandeer the four planes that crashed into the trade center, Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. Five people on the FBI’s list, one of whom was being detained Tuesday, were scheduled to be on that San Antonio flight.
Attorney General John Ashcroft acknowledged Tuesday that it was possible other hijackings had been planned for Sept. 11 or in the future, but he did not provide details. Ashcroft said that authorities have detained 75 people so far and arrested four of them as material witnesses, meaning they may information directly related to the attacks.
We are looking at the possibility that there may have been more than four planes targeted for hijacking, but we are not able at this time to confirm that, Ashcroft said. We do believe that there are associates of the hijackers that have connections to terrorist organizations that may still be in the United States.
In other developments Tuesday in the fast-paced investigation, a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States has received information from a foreign intelligence service that Atta met earlier this year in Europe with an Iraqi intelligence agent. The raw intelligence came in since the attacks last Tuesday and has not yet been corroborated by U.S. authorities, the official said.
Authorities also detained a man in San Diego, Calif., who was linked through financial transactions to two of the 19 hijackers, officials said. Tarek Mohamed Fayad, 33, was taken into federal custody on Monday for questioning about a possible link to one of the hijackers, law enforcement officials said.
Fayad’s name is among those on the FBI list of potential suspects and witnesses being sought around the world. The list, which contains raw intelligence and is updated frequently, offers insight to the leads being pursued by investigators.
Among them:
Law enforcement officials are searching for people in at least 17 states and several other countries, but by far most of those on the list -- more than 40 -- have had addresses at one time in Florida. Twenty-five cited Flight Safety Drive as their temporary address in Vero Beach, where they attended Flight Safety Academy. Another 23 are listed as Saudi Arabian Airlines students temporarily living in the same area.
The FBI has identified 60 flights from airports ranging from Buffalo to Albuquerque to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, that potential witnesses or co-conspirators were expected to take in coming weeks. Many of the tickets were bought over the Internet for flights that were scheduled within days of the attacks, but were canceled when airports were closed.
Strangely two of the hijackers had bought tickets for flights scheduled after the Sept. 11 attacks. Ahmed Alghamdi, who was on the United Airlines plane that hit the World Trade Center, had also purchased tickets for a flight the next day from Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. to Saudi Arabia. Atta also appears to have been booked on a Delta flight from Baltimore to San Francisco; the date of that flight is unclear.
Two people on the list are said to be associated with a man arrested in Jordan in connection with planned terrorist attacks that were to coincide with the millennium. A third person on the list is linked to a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole battleship in Yemen.
The FBI’s list includes a lot of raw, unverified information, gathered as it pursues every possible lead at the beginning of an urgent and massive investigation.
The list’s wide dissemination to enforcement officials throughout the U.S. has enabled some in the media to obtain, through sources, many of the names on it -- and several of the people identified publicly claim they are on the list mistakenly, because of odd coincidences or cases of mistaken identity.
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