Posted on 09/19/2001 11:14:48 AM PDT by MindBender26
An Orlando based Egyptian national, who owns a Florida travel agency, is now seen by federal agents as a key to terrorist travel into and throughout the US.
The man, who was arrested by FBI agents on Sunday, is being held in a local county jail. The jail is used to house federal prisoners in transit, as there is no federal jail in this area. The suspect's house has been thoroughly searched by federal agents and is now secured by them.
Officials close to the investigation believe the man was a key to terrorist movement into and through the United States in the weeks and months leading up to the attacks on New York and Washington. The hijackers were seen in Florida just before the explosions last week and there are additional reports that the terrorists took the same flights as those seized a week before the hijackings, in an apparent “dress rehearsal” of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Security at the jail is extraordinarily tight, with federal agents openly armed with MP5 submachine guns in and around the jail.
Central Florida has been a hotbed of terrorist activity, with many of their pilots trained here. In addition to the pilots, the current head of Islamic Jihad went “underground” as an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa for three years in order to escape a Mossad death squad. Reports have circulated for years that the Islamic Jihad leader, Ramadan Abdallah, used Moslem flight students as his own private air taxi service as he traveled from Tampa to visit Moslem Student Associations and other fundamentalist groups on campuses throught the country.
More to come on this.
You forgot their vital service keeping donut stores terrorist free.
That's an issue for the USSC to resolve. Let's see, they have an opening in the court calender in early 2007.....
USA TODAY
November 22, 1999, Monday, FINAL EDITION
NEWS; Pg. 6A
Crash could damage Egypt's tourism industry
Marco R. della Cava
CAIRO, Egypt -- Some fear that another casualty from the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 could be this country's tourism industry, which is second only to oil as the nation's prime source of foreign revenue.
Each year, about 4 million tourists contribute an estimated $ 4 billion to the Egyptian economy, mostly during the peak season,
which runs from November through April. Egypt only recently rebounded from the tragedy of Nov. 17, 1997, when six terrorists massacred 58 tourists in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, an hour flight south of Cairo.
One of the more cynical conspiracy theories floating about suggests that Israel engineered the crash to divert tourists from Egypt to its millennial celebrations.
"This is so people will choose Jerusalem over Cairo," student Mohammed el-Askari says. "It's a war against EgyptAir."
If so, it's not working, judging from interviews with U.S. tourists visiting Cairo's famed museum of antiquities, home of the King Tut treasures.
"I had no hesitation in coming," says travel agent Linda Boerner of Tampa, who flew here on EgyptAir. "I think it's likely the
pilot, not mechanical."
Christine Vaughn of Fort Wayne, Ind., who doesn't have a theory about the crash, took her flight on EgyptAir because it operates non-stop service from New York.
"I've wanted to come here since I was a little girl," she says. "No way was I going to postpone."
Hers is a popular sentiment. "There are no rooms available all over Egypt," says Ahmed Badawi, a manager at the Egyptrav office in Cairo. "We don't think the crash will have any affect on us."
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