Investigation into U.S. attacks reveals growing Mideast links
By Ha'aretz Staff and News Agencies
The FBI investigation into Tuesday's terror attacks, now in full swing, on Thursday saw the investigation become increasingly focused on the Middle East. Four domestic flights were hijacked Tuesday morning; two ploughed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, a third hit the Pentagon in Washington and the fourth crashed into a field 80 miles outside Pittsburgh. There were no survivors from any of the flights.
Iowa Senator Charles Grassley (R) said that from a briefing he had received from terrorism specialists, he was told that some of the hijackers had connections to Osama bin Laden, and that others were connected to militant organizations, such as Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and the Lebanese guerilla group Hezbollah.
Osama bin Laden, a Saudi-born self-declared enemy of the United States, is currently in Afghanistan, which is ruled by the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic group. International aid workers fled from the capital city of Kabul on Wednesday as residents worried about a possible U.S. military strike.
The Taliban said Wednesday that bin Laden denied any responsibility for Tuesday's attacks, and have demanded to see evidence backing allegations that bin Laden runs a global terrorism network responsible for the hijackings. Bin Laden has been given asylum in Afghanistan, where it was reported Thursday that he has been placed under house arrest by Taliban authorities.
CNN added that information found in another rental car left in Boston's Logan Airport led investigators to two more men who were pilots: Mohammed Atta and Marwan Yousef Alshehhii. Inside the car was an Arabic-language flight manual.
The two men held passports from the United Arab Emirates. A Florida driver's license was issued to Atta on May 2, 2001, and he previously held an Egyptian driver's license.
Both Atta and Alshehhii were believed to have stayed in an apartment in Hamburg prior to arriving in the United States. An official representative for security in Hamburg's government that people with those names - both from the United Arab Emirates - had been registered as Hamburg residents, and had been studying at the Technical University in the suburb of Harburg.
German police said Thursday they had detained an airport worker in an investigation on the attacks. "We have in the search for a suspect of Moroccan origin searched an apartment in Hamburg and provisionally detained one person, a man," the head of the Hamburg state police, Gerhard Mueller said.
One set of hijackers is believed to have crossed from Canada and have ties to bin Laden.
German prosecutors said Thursday that two of the suspected hijackers had studied electronics at Hamburg Technical University. A third suspect had also been enrolled at the university.
Two of them had been registered in Germany as citizens of the United Arab Emirates and had not come to the attention of police before the attacks. Police detained one man Thursday in the course of searching apartments where they had lived.
"We are deeply saddened and shaken that the tracks of criminals reach to our university in Hamburg," said Christian Nedeff, president of the university. "They didn't have the word 'terrorist' written on their foreheads."
One of the suspected hijackers was identified as 33-year-old Atta. Students said they had heard Atta had been enrolled at the university for eight years. The two others had been students there for about a year, students said.
U.S. officials have identified more than a dozen hijackers of Middle Eastern descent in Tuesday's attacks and gathered evidence linking them to bin Laden and other terrorist networks, law enforcement officials said. In all, some 50 people may have been involved in the plot, government officials say.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said 12 to 24 hijackers commandeered the four planes, and a government official said another two dozen are believed to have assisted them.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, told reporters after an intelligence briefing that authorities in Boston had recovered a flight manual in Arabic from a bag that was believed to have belonged to one of the hijackers.
Heavily armed federal agents and police searched two hotels in the Boston area, where officials reportedly identified five Arab men as suspects and seized a rental car at the city's airport containing Arabic-language materials.
Investigators found a copy of the Koran, a videotape on how to fly commercial jets and a fuel consumption calculator in a pair of bags meant for American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the World Trade Center, the Boston Globe said.
Time magazine said in a special report that U.S. officials told it that each of the "terrorist teams had a certified pilot with them, some of whom had flown for Saudi Airlines."
Time said two of the men had been placed on a border watch list which should have denied them entry into the country, but they got in anyway and appear to have been on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
There are also reports that the hijackers were of Egyptian and Saudi origin. Israel Radio quoted an NBC report saying that one of the suspected hijack pilots, Mohammed Atta, had been involved in bus attacks in Israel several years ago.
The investigation swept from a Boston hotel to Florida and points beyond - all in an attempt to determine who was behind the attacks in which two hijacked airliners barreled into the 110-story towers, a third dove into the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in western Pennsylvania.
A Venice, Florida, man said FBI agents interviewed him and said that two men who stayed in his home last summer while training at a local flight school were among the hijackers.
CNN reported that the two men were Adnan Bukhari and his brother Ameer Abbas Bukhari, who, according to the landlord, claimed to be Saudi pilots.
Administration anxious to explain Bush's actions
President George Bush condemned the onslaught as acts of war and NATO gave the United States its backing for a military response if the attacks were directed from abroad. As a sign of support for the president, NATO invoked its mutual defense clause for the first time in its 52-year history, opening the way for a possible collective military response to the shattering attacks.
In Washington, the Bush administration disclosed that the White House and Air Force One may have been among the targets of Tuesday's devastation. Authorities had specific credible information that both Air Force One and the White House were targets, and that the plane that hit the Pentagon may have been headed for the White House, said Sean McCormack, spokesman for President Bush's National Security Council.
The administration, eager to explain why Bush did not immediately return to Washington and take clear charge in Tuesday's chaos, said the executive mansion and presidential jet had been threatened by the terrorists.
There was speculation that, in the case of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, the hijackers intended to jet elsewhere but were thwarted by passengers.
Indicators that death toll in the thousands
In one indication of the potential death toll, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was asked about a report that the city has requested 6,000 body bags from federal officials. "Yes, I believe that's correct," said the mayor.
In another, 2,500 people visited a grief counseling center handling questions about missing family members Wednesday.
Giuliani said the best estimate is that a few thousand victims would be left in each building, potentially including 250 missing firefighters and police officers. There were 82 confirmed fatalities - a number that was sure to grow. Another 1,700 injuries were reported.
The four hijacked planes carried 266 people, none of whom survived. Officials from the military services said about 150 people, mostly Army personnel, were missing in the attack on the Pentagon. There had been estimates of 800 dead, but that was discounted by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
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