2d arrest warrant issued; 25 others questioned

By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff, 9/16/2001

nvestigators probing Tuesday's terrorist attacks issued a second arrest warrant for an unnamed ''material witness'' last night, as they began questioning 25 people detained on US immigration charges and pursued a growing wave of leads.

As President Bush declared that the probe's ''prime suspect'' is suspected international terrorism mastermind Osama bin Laden, authorities pursued the case from Logan International Airport and a Watertown apartment complex to Texas, Toronto, Germany, and the Philippines.

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, with Bush at Camp David, said: ''We are beginning to understand the ways in which this terrible crime was committed. The investigation is developing a kind of clarity.''

The first arrest in the case was made Friday in New York, when the FBI detained a suspect whom the FBI called a ''material witness'' and who reportedly carried a bogus pilot's license.

Last night, federal prosecutors in New York issued a second arrest warrant for a suspect who remained at large.

Using immigration laws that allow officials to hold people without formal charges for 48 hours or more, federal agents began to question another 25 people yesterday, including two men seized from a train in Texas.

By last night, none of the 25 faced charges in connection with the hijackings and crashes that leveled the World Trade Center and ripped through the Pentagon. Ashcroft said that many of the 25 are on a list of 100 people the FBI thinks have information about the 19 suspected hijackers. The FBI has distributed the list to 18,000 local police departments, aviation officials, and Border Patrol offices.

The investigation, called PENTTBOM by the FBI, has attracted more than 36,000 leads from telephone calls and tips submitted over the Internet, authorities said.

US cities remain under threat, said Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. ''You've got to assume there was probably more planned, maybe for the aftershock.''

Locally, authorities said residents of two apartments on Coolidge Avenue in Watertown were questioned for three hours Friday night by federal agents for reasons that remained unclear last night. No one was arrested, and no search warrant was executed, authorities said.

Sources in Boston familiar with the probe said they have so far seen no evidence suggesting that a local terrorist cell had been in place and had aided the 10 hijackers who used Logan Airport to launch attacks Tuesday.

Those sources also said that investigators are serving warrants on the Internet service providers through which some of the hijackers bought airline tickets over the World Wide Web. Authorities hope to determine which computers were used.

Two men seized Wednesday from an Amtrak train in Fort Worth, Texas, were flown to New York for more questioning, FBI agents in Dallas said.

The men gave their names as Ayub Ali Khan, 51, and Mohamed Jaweed Azmath, 47, and said they were from India. They were carrying $5,000 in cash, hair dye, and box cutters, officials said.

The two men, whose names and nationality the FBI would not confirm, were on a TWA flight that left Newark Airport Tuesday morning, before the terror attacks, bound for San Antonio.

After the plane made a stop in St. Louis and was grounded by the FAA, the men boarded a San Antonio-bound train Wednesday. They were held after they became involved in a disturbance, officials said.

Yesterday, with an Army helicopter circling overhead, the FBI searched a Jersey City apartment rented by the two men, removing several boxes of evidence. Neighbors told reporters that one to four people were taken into custody.

In Germany, police in the city of Bochum seized evidence, including ''airplane-related documents'' that were found in a suitcase believed to have belonged to a hijacker, when they raided the apartment of the girlfriend of Ziad Jarrahi, 26, one of the 19 suspects. Jarrahi is a Lebanese native who was on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.

Authorities say evidence amassed since Tuesday indicates that two key players in the hijackings of flights that left Boston on Tuesday morning for Los Angeles and later crashed into the World Trade Center towers were Mohamed Atta, 33, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, 23. Both had trained as pilots in Florida.

Atta was on American Airlines Flight 11, which slammed into the north tower. Al-Shehhi was on United Air Lines Flight 175, which ripped into the south tower 20 minutes later.

Atta and Al-Shehhi stayed together last summer in the home of a former flight school worker, and they spent time together in the northern German city of Hamburg, where, investigators said, they were part of an extremist group that had plotted attacks against US targets. Al-Shehhi had entered the United States on a tourist visa, authorities said.

Besides Atta, Al-Shehhi, and Jarrahi, the hijackers were believed to have included trained pilots, including Hani Hajour, who was on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, and Wail Alshehri and Abdulaziz Alomari, who were on American Flight 11 with Atta.

Wail and Waleed M. Alsherhi reportedly spent the night before the attacks at the Park Inn motel on Route 9 in Chestnut Hill, in a room that has been stripped for clues by investigators.

Also yesterday, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that Atta had been wanted in Florida on an arrest warrant for failing to appear in traffic court.

The warrant was issued in May, after Atta did not appear in court following a traffic stop by a Broward County sheriff's deputy. Atta was cited for failing to produce a driver's license after an unspecified traffic offense in the Fort Lauderdale area on April 26. Atta was driving a red 1986 Pontiac, the newspaper said.

Atta is believed to have flown from Portland, Maine, to Boston on the morning of the attacks. A suitcase with his name, found after it did not make it onto American Flight 11, included training videos for Boeing jets, a knife, a document described as a will or a suicide note, and a copy of the Koran.

According to the FBI, the other hijackers on Flight 11 included the two Alsherhi men; Abdulaziz Alomari, who reportedly accompanied Atta on the flight to Boston from Portland; and Satam Al Suqami. Besides Al-Shehhi, others on United Flight 175 included Fayez Ahmed, Ahmed Alghamdi, Hamza Alghamdi, and Mohald Alsherhi, all of whom reportedly lived at times in Delray Beach, Fla.

One puzzling piece of evidence is that a man with the same name as suspected terrorist Alghamdi is listed as holding a Massachusetts license from 1992 to 1998, with the address of a Susse Chalet motel on Route 2 in Cambridge. It could not be determined last night whether the license holder was the same man on the hijacked flight. The Globe traced the Social Security number on the license to a man now living in Seattle who family members said in a phone interview has no link to Alghamdi.

To date, authorities have said that the weapons apparently used by the hijackers who boarded in Boston were box cutters and knives under 4 inches long, which were allowed on flights under FAA guidelines before the FAA banned them Wednesday.

There were also these developments yesterday:

An FBI spokesman, Bill Crowley, said that the cockpit voice recorder found at the Pennsylvania site was in ''fairly good condition'' and that the National Transportation Safety Board sent it to the manufacturer for help in extracting information. Several news reports have said that a passenger calling out on a cellphone reported hearing an explosion and seeing smoke in the cabin before the plane crashed. Crowley said ''no evidence of an explosion on board'' had been found, but added: ''That certainly has not been discounted yet.''

The voice recorder found Friday in the Pentagon rubble was described by authorities as yielding no information, because it was severely burned in the crash. Recording devices from the planes in New York have not been found.

Authorities were searching for a Muslim cleric, Moataz Al-Hallak, who left the northeastern United States Monday headed for Texas, one day before the attacks, the Associated Press reported. He was questioned by prosecutors in the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, which were linked to bin Laden.

CNN and Newsweek reported late yesterday that the FBI had begun an investigation of two of the suspected hijackers two weeks before the attacks, after one was seen on a surveillance tape meeting in Malaysia with one of the suspects in the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, in October 2000, which killed 17 US sailors.

Khalid Al-Midhar, indentified as one of the hijackers on American Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon, was being sought by FBI agents in the New York and Los Angeles offices, Newsweek said. The Central Intelligence Agency notified immigration officials on Aug. 21 that Al-Midhar should be placed on a watch list because he was suspected to be a bin Laden associate. Immigration officials determined that Al-Midhar and the second suspect on Flight 77, Nawaq Alhamzi, had entered the United States together.

FBI efforts to track the men were thwarted because they listed a Marriott Hotel in New York as their US address, which turned out to be fake, Newsweek said.

Federal investigators played down reports aired on television networks Friday night that Boston, Atlanta, and Richmond had been targeted by terrorists for unspecified attacks. ''As far as credible evidence that those cities were targets, we're just not there at this point in the investigation,'' a Justice Department official said.

An Italian newspaper, Corriere della Serra, reported yesterday that the FBI is probing the possibility that bin Laden associates tried to profit from the disaster by ''short-selling'' stocks in reinsurance companies before the attack, possibly including shares of AXA in France, Munich Re in Germany, and Swiss Re in Switzerland.

Canadian immigration authorities were preparing to turn over to the FBI a man detained in Toronto who had been on a plane diverted after the World Trade Center attacks, according to the Washington Post. Corporal Benoit Desjardins of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said authorities found a picture of the man dressed in a flight jacket against a backdrop of the World Trade Center, as well as a Palestinian Authority travel document identifying him as an aircraft maintenance engineer at the Gaza airport.

Philippine officials quoted by the Post said three men surnamed Al-Sheihhi, with passports from Oman, may have been making a bomb to attack the US Embassy in Manila before they hastily fled the country last Sunday.

NBC reported that US officials are investigating an anonymous letter sent to a Cayman Islands radio station on Aug. 29, asserting that three Afghan nationals who had entered the islands were agents of bin Laden organizing a terrorist attack against the United States. On Sept. 6, the station forwarded the letter to Cayman officials, who treated it as speculation. Since then, Cayman authorities have interviewed the unnamed letter writer and are holding three Afghan men on illegal immigration charges.

Matthew Brelis, Maureen Goggin, Stephen Kurkjian, Shelley Murphy, Ralph Ranalli, and Wayne Washington of the Globe Staff contributed to this report. Material from wire services was used. Peter Howe can be reached by e-mail at howe@globe.com.

This story ran on page A25 of the Boston Globe on 9/16/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.