Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Guidance and Visibility -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Smart_Money who wrote (19338)	10/1/2001 5:16:55 PM
From: 2MAR$	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 208838

Chiquita lays off 400 Panama banana workers..uh oh everyone's losing their jobs ! imagine picking bannanas for a living ... I was a "pinapple picker" in Maui once , in my teens that was rough work , but got to do alot of diving. ;-)

To: Smart_Money who wrote (19338)	10/1/2001 5:27:59 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 208838

MONDAY OCTOBER 01 2001 The Times(UK) The hunt Fugitive says 14 terrorist pilots still on the loose BY DANIEL MCGRORY A HAND-PICKED team of 14 young Muslims who were trained to fly Boeing jets in secret at an airbase in Afghanistan are believed to be hiding in Europe and America using fake passports and identities. Seven of the team are known to speak fluent English and left Afghanistan more than a year ago with enough flying skill to stage further suicide attacks. Security services worldwide, already overwhelmed by the hunt for “sleepers” that Osama bin Laden has in place, have been told to track down these 14 men. They were trained by a senior pilot working for Ariana, the Afghan state-owned airline, who revealed how the Taleban administration ordered him and four other captains to teach the 14-strong group to handle large commercial jets. The captain, known only as Rasul Parvaz, said he did not know what became of his students after they were smuggled out of Afghanistan. What has disturbed the FBI is Captain Rasul’s description of the men as polite, wellmannered and educated but who were “dedicated Muslim fanatics” who kept telling him that they believed they were part of a holy war. An FBI source said yesterday: “We need to find these men as they were obviously not trained for a career to fly holidaymakers around.” British authorities knew nothing about a 27-year-old Algerian, Lotfi Raissi, who lived in Colnbrook, Berkshire, who for most of the past year has been visiting a number of flying schools in America, allegedly to show the four pilots of the hijacked jets how to steer passenger planes into their designated targets. Mr Raissi, who faces years of an expensive and complicated extradition process brought by the US Government, first came to Britain eight years ago allegedly using false identity documents. He then allegedly stole the identity of a 74-year-old grandmother from New Jersey, Dorothy Hansen, and used her social security number to obtain licenses in America. The FBI are further embarrassed that Mrs Hansen’s grand-niece was among the victims killed in the World Trade Centre on September 11. Mr Lotfi will be questioned further today about who else he may have trained to fly. Zacarias Moussaoui, another formerly British-based pilot who lived as a student in South London for five years, is still refusing to co-operate with FBI investigators who arrested him while he was training to join the suicide mission as the twentieth hijacker. The 33-year-old French-Moroccan who was supposedly studying international trade, is thought to have sheltered other bin Laden agents at his Brixton flat. German investigators say they intercepted a phone call from Mr Moussaoui to an apartment there used by Mohammed Atta, the leader of the September 11 attacks. The focus is now on the 14 missing pilots from Afghanistan. These students had either fought with Taleban or had fathers with close links to the regime, Captain Rasul said, and were from a number of countries in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. His account suggests that the Taleban have been actively helping bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organisation to train pilots by offering the use of their airline staff and the three Boeing aircraft from their ageing fleet which remain grounded because of a UN flight ban. The seven who spoke English, Captain Rasul said, spent some of their training translating flying manuals into languages spoken in Afghanistan such as Persian, Urdu and Pashto so they could be used by other recruits. The 14 recruits began with intensive classroom training before the team were moved to a military airfield at Bamiyan where they were taught by three more pilots, including a retired Pakistani officer named Islam Khan. Captain Rasul, who disclosed his role in schooling these young fanatics to the respected Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper, is now in hiding for fear of reprisals from the Taleban. The FBI urgently want to speak to the captain to help them to identify the 14 and so trace who has been sheltering and funding them since they left Afghanistan. The US authorities already knew about terrorist plans to turn hijacked planes into flying bombs as the architect of the idea was in their custody. Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, conceived the idea of simultaneously hijacking 11 aircraft and blowing them up in mid-air. If US agents thought that far-fetched they had also arrested one of his close associates, Abdul Hakim Murad, who had taken flying lessons and was being encouraged to crash a Cessna light aircraft loaded with chemical weapons on to the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Security services on both sides of the Atlantic are checking the records of every flying school after the discovery that Mr Raissi was allegedly using them as a bin Laden training centre.