Breaking news:
A heavily armed FBI team searching for suspects in the terrorism attacks in New York and Washington stormed a Boston hotel Wednesday. One person was arrested, according to broadcast reports. There is also a report that cops arrested suspects in Boston with ties to suspected terror mastermind Usama bin Laden, but is unclear whether these arrests were made at the hotel.
One person was taken out of the hotel in a van. WHDH-TV, who had a reporter in the hotel, said one person was arrested and one wounded.
A couple of dozen officers, wearing bulletproof vests and carrying shields, were seen bringing fiber-optic equipment into the Westin Hotel in the Back Bay section. It is believed that some of Tuesday's hijackers were housed at the Westin.
WHDH reported the officers were using the equipment to check under hotel room doors on hotel's 16th floor, quoting the reporter inside the hotel.
Three ambulances and a police car were stationed outside the hotel as a crowd of onlookers gathered there. Police officers returned repeatedly to a police truck outside to retrieve the fiber-optic equipment, which can be slipped under doors to see inside rooms, WHDH-TV reported.
Meanwhile, police officers converged on the Park Inn at Chestnut Hill in Newton, a Boston suburb. Newton police officer Russ Adam said the FBI was conducting an investigation at the hotel. A clerk at the hotel confirmed the agents were there but said he could not say anything more.
Cops also took people with ties to bin Laden into custody in Florida.
The arrests followed a Boston Herald report that authorities in Massachusetts had identified at least five Arab men as suspects in the attacks launched from Logan Airport, after seizing a car laden with Arabic-language flight training manuals in the airport's central parking garage.
WCVB-TV in Boston reported the car had Virginia license plates.
Two of the men, whose passports were traced to the United Arab Emirates, were brothers, and one was a trained pilot, a source told the Herald, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Investigators suspect the brothers were aboard United Airlines Flight 175, one of two flights that crashed into the World Trade Center.
Federal authorities were investigating whether suspected hijackers of one jetliner entered the United States from Canada and may be linked to bin Laden, law enforcement officials said.
Officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said they were investigating whether one group of hijackers crossed the Canadian border at a checkpoint and eventually went to Logan Airport, where an American Airlines flight was hijacked and later flown into the World Trade Center in New York.
Authorities also were developing intelligence linking the suspected attackers to a band of bin Laden sympathizers in Canada, some of Algerian origin, who are suspected of planning an unsuccessful terrorist attack on U.S. soil during the millennium celebrations.
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The two suspects from Maine were apparently using New Jersey driver licenses, Maine Gov. Angus King said Wednesday. They left behind a rental car that was impounded in the Portland area.
The Boston Globe reported that authorities found an instructional video on flying commercial airliners and a copy of the Koran in two bags that did not make it onto American Airlines Flight 11.
Penn. Crash Suspects Identified
The hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93 have already been identified, according to a well-informed source close to the Bush administration.
The source said: "The key is what we're finding in Pennsylvania at the wreck site. There's much [there] that didn't burn and has been salvaged."
The source added that based on materials already found, "the hijackers have been identified by name." The source specified that these individuals are indeed linked to bin Laden.
The federal government was employing its full resources Wednesday to follow up on 700 leads and find those responsible for Tuesday's devastating terror attacks.
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies were said to be focusing their efforts almost exclusively on bin Laden, who had recently warned of massive attacks against the United States.
Bin Laden congratulated the people who carried out the attacks but denied that he was involved, a Palestinian journalist said.
The U.N. is currently withdrawing its international staff from Afghanistan, where bin Laden, a fugitive Saudi billionaire, has lived for the last several years.
FBI Searches Florida
Amid evidence that suspected bin Laden supporters were operating in Florida, federal agents were also focusing some of their efforts in that state.
In Venice, a couple who housed two Arab-looking flight school students as a favor in July 2000 was questioned by the FBI.
"They informed me that there were two individuals that were students at Huffman Aviation, my employer, and FBI told me they were involved in yesterday's tragedy," Charlie Voss said.
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Voss said the men were asked to leave their home after a week when the couple grew uncomfortable with them.
The FBI in Miami also issued a national bulletin for law enforcement agencies to be on the lookout for two cars.
In Daytona Beach, authorities towed a car registered to Ali Mohammed Al-Darmaki, a 20-year-old former student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Al-Darmaki never took flight classes and left the school last June or July because of poor grades, said police Sgt. Al Tolley.
Al-Darmaki no longer lives in the area and Tolley said police did not know his whereabouts. At least one Middle Eastern Embry-Riddle student was missing as of last night. Authorities were looking into reports he may have been on one of the hijacked planes.
The government believes the hijackers were trained pilots and that three to five were aboard each of four airliners, said Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker.
She said the conclusion was based on information gathered from frantic phone calls made by passengers on the doomed jets.
Evidence Mounts Against bin Laden
"Everything is pointing in the direction of Osama bin Laden," said Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
A flight manifest from one of the ill-fated flights included the name of a suspected bin Laden supporter, Hatch and several law enforcement officials confirmed.
Officials began piecing together a case linking bin Laden to the attack early Tuesday, aided by an intercept of communications between bin Laden supporters discussing the attacks, according to Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch.
"They have an intercept of some information that included people associated with bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit," Hatch said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Officials also speculated about the timing of the attack.
In June, a U.S. judge had set this Wednesday as the sentencing date for a bin Laden associate for his role in the 1998 bombing of a U.S. embassy in Tanzania that killed 213 people. The sentencing had been set for the federal courthouse near the World Trade Center.
Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, said he received a warning from Islamic fundamentalists close to bin Laden, but did not take the threat seriously. "They said it would be a huge and unprecedented attack but they did not specify," Atwan said in a telephone interview in London.
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There are other less likely suspects. An early Tuesday report from London, quoting Abu Dhabi TV, said the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) claimed responsibility for the attack, but MBC (Middle East Broadcasting) later reported the DFLP denied any involvement.
The FBI also served search warrants to major Internet service providers in order to get information about an e-mail address that may be connected to the attacks. Among those who received warrants was Earthlink, officials said. |
