NBC NEWS
Al-Qaida newly suspected in 8 cities
Mohammed arrest leads
to urgent investigations
WASHINGTON, March 10 — Information seized during the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, has triggered new investigations of possible al-Qaida operatives in eight U.S. cities, including New York and Detroit, U.S. officials told NBC News.
THE CIA AND the FBI are reviewing financial documents tied to a second man, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who was arrested with Mohammed on March 1 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, officials said.
Hawsawi, named as a supporting conspirator in the indictment of alleged would-be Sept. 11 hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui, is believed to have been the money man for Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network.
The indictment traces a trail of money transfers to and from the United Arab Emirates, where al-Hawsawi allegedly coordinated payments for the Sept. 11 attacks. It charges that days before Sept. 11, some of the 19 hijackers who died on the four jetliners used in the operation wired tens of thousands of dollars of unused money back to al-Hawsawi.
For the first time, however, documents seized among thousands of pieces of evidence in the joint U.S.-Pakistani raid this month — including computers, hard drives and cellular telephones — revealed that al-Qaida money transfers into the United States had continued after September 2001, senior officials said on condition of anonymity.
U.S. and Pakistani officials said al-Hawsawi was not cooperating with his interrogators in an undisclosed country, but they called the documents a big break. The documents could provide “a direct link to potential terrorists,” especially to sleeper cells in the United States, one of the officials said.
INVESTIGATIONS IN EIGHT CITIES
Security experts called discovery of the information highly significant in breaking those cells.
Al-Hawsawi “knows where they are because every conspirator needs to get money,” said Steve Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project, a Washington research institute that studies international terrorism.
A senior U.S. official said people in New York, Detroit — home to one of the country’s largest Muslim communities — and six other cities were under round-the-clock surveillance while the FBI searched telephone records and bank accounts. The other cities could not immediately be determined.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind, shortly after his capture March 1 in Pakistan.
Officials cautioned that some of the suspects could prove not to be connected to terrorists, but security experts said the evidence was priceless regardless.
“Any leads coming back into the United States are very significant because they would confirm people either under investigation or actually provide new leads for investigators as to who is working or connected to Osama bin Laden,” Emerson said.
MJ Gohel, chief executive of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, an independent policy institution in London, went further.
“If the money trail is followed, I believe that the entire al-Qaida network around the world can be located,” Gohel said in an interview.
U.S. officials said the search for Osama bin Laden had netted only low-level al-Qaida operatives so far in Pakistan, but they told NBC News that the breakthrough arrests of Mohammed and al-Hawsawi were reason for new optimism.
msnbc.com |
