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Terrorists testing jets, crews sayBy Audrey HudsonTHE WASHINGTON TIMES Flight crews and air marshals say Middle Eastern men are staking out airports, probing security measures and conducting test runs aboard airplanes for a terrorist attack.     At least two midflight incidents have involved numerous men of Middle Eastern descent behaving in what one pilot called "stereotypical" behavior of an organized attempt to attack a plane. ---Snip--- A June 29 incident aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles is similar to a Feb. 15 incident on American Airlines Flight 1732 from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New York's John...

What Really Happened on Flight 327? By JOE SHARKEY Published: July 20, 2004 There is no doubt that something out of the ordinary happened on Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on June 29. The plane was met at the airport by squads of federal agents and police responding to radio messages from the pilots about concerns that 14 Middle Eastern male passengers had spent the four-hour flight acting suspiciously.

A Moroccan terror suspect held in Britain was part of the "commando group" who led the attack on September 11, a court has heard. Farid Hilali, 35, was a British link to the al Qaida terrorists who carried out Osama bin Laden's orders to attack the US, Bow Street magistrates' court heard. The court was also told of a wedding video of another of the commando group which included two of the suicide pilots on September 11. Hilali has been held since last September under immigration offences but Spain has issued a European arrest warrant to extradite him for terror...

Hijackers allowed to stay for fear of infringing their human rights By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor (Filed: 14/07/2004) Nine Afghan gunmen who hijacked an airliner four years ago and forced it to fly to London have been told they can stay in Britain with their wives and children. After a secret court hearing, immigration adjudicators refused them asylum but ruled that they could not be deported because their human rights would be infringed. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, described the ruling as "crazy" last night on the grounds that it sent the wrong signals to others tempted to...

You may have heard of this lately, or perhaps have had it happen to you. That's right...your internet browser gets hijacked. Taken from your control, as it were. It takes you to sites you would never have visited in a million years; your computer slows down and maybe crashes; your homepage is mysteriously changed; you now have about a dozen "favorites" that you never selected and don't want. You've been HIJACKED! What happened? How? You ask, as you pull your hair out in disgust. Well, it happened to me,, and some FReepers I know, and a LOT of my friends,...

Court Reinstates Charges Against Local 9/11 Figure; El Cajon Student Accused Of Lying About Ties To Hijackers SAN DIEGO -- A federal appeals court Friday reinstated charges against a Jordanian college student accused of lying about his associations with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court judge's ruling that had dismissed perjury charges against Osama Awadallah in April 2002. U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin had ruled that the government's jailing of material witnesses for a grand jury investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was unconstitutional. Awadallah was among...

Recently translated documents captured by U.S. forces provide new evidence of a direct link between Saddam Hussein's regime and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Rosters of officers in Saddam's Fedayeen list Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who was present at the January 2000 al-Qaida "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9-11 attacks were planned, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Fedayeen was the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday, which was deployed to do much of the regime's dirty work. The U.S. has never been sure Shakir was at the Kuala...

Achille Lauro What happened during the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985? AP Photo Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, 1985 On October 7, 1985 four heavily armed terrorists representing the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, with some 100 mostly elderly passengers on board, in Egyptian waters. The hijackers demanded that Israel free 50 Palestinian prisoners, and to prove their determination, they shot and killed a disabled American tourist, 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer, and threw his body overboard with his wheelchair. After a two-day drama, the Egyptian government, unaware that Klinghoffer...

2 Middle Eastern men detained FBI: Duo bought plane tickets, but gave false phone numbers BY LENNY SAVINO Herald Washington Bureau WASHINGTON -- Two Middle Eastern men who paid cash for one-way airline tickets from New York to Amsterdam and apparently gave false phone numbers to a New York City travel agency were being questioned Monday by the FBI, the agency said. The men bought tickets for Friday night's Delta Air Lines Flight 80, scheduled to leave John F. Kennedy International Airport at 8:15 p.m. They were detained before boarding the flight, which was canceled. The FBI would not ...

Bolivia Detains 16 Muslims on Terror Tipoff -Agency Thu December 4, 2003 09:08 PM ET LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Bolivia's state news agency said authorities in La Paz detained 16 Muslims on Thursday after a tip-off from French police that some of them were planning to hijack a plane and attack targets in the United States. No independent confirmation was immediately available of the report from the ABI agency, which is regarded as a mouthpiece of the Bolivian government. It quoted Interior Minister Alfonso Ferrufino as saying most of those arrested were Bangladeshis and that they were detained at...

The discovery of a mysterious stash of shoes with makeshift insoles in a bathroom ceiling at the Days Hotel in Brighton yesterday has raised enough eyebrows to draw the attention of the FBI, state and local police. ``We have been notified and are responding,'' said FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz.Three hotel workers who removed the insoles in the basement of the Soldiers Field Road hotel were overcome with noxious fumes and experienced minor respiratory problems about 12:30 p.m., police said. The workers, along with a Boston police officer called to the scene, were treated and released from St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Boston...

US Heard 'Tomorrow Is Zero Hour' on Eve of Attacks June 19— By Tabassum Zakaria WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence intercepted two messages the day before the Sept. 11 attacks that indicated an event was planned the following day, but the communications were not translated until Sept. 12, government sources said on Wednesday.The National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on communications worldwide, intercepted messages that said "tomorrow is zero hour" and "the match begins tomorrow," sources said on condition of anonymity.The agency did not translate the messages, which were in Arabic, until Sept. 12 -- the day after hijacked airliners...

May 23 — A paid FBI informant told ABCNEWS that three years before Sept. 11, he began providing the FBI with information about a young Saudi who later flew a hijacked passenger plane into the Pentagon. Aukai Collins, the informant, said he worked for the FBI for four years in Phoenix, monitoring the Arab and Islamic communities there. Hani Hanjour was the hijacker Collins claimed to have told the FBI about while Hanjour was in flight training in Phoenix. Twenty hours after ABCNEWS first requested a response, the FBI issued an "emphatic denial" that Collins had told the agency anything...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Thirteen days before the Sept. 11 attacks, a frustrated FBI agent warned headquarters that "someday, someone will die" after he was denied permission to pursue a man who would become one of the hijackers, a congressional panel was told Friday. The agent's efforts were among many missed opportunities to stop two of the hijackers after they were spotted attending an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, according to the report to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. It was the latest revelation of apparent failures by intelligence and law enforcement authorities before the attacks. In...

<p>PATERSON, N.J. — A man who allegedly sold fake IDs to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers apparently fled the country for Egypt just before authorities came to arrest him in a raid on his home and businesses Wednesday, investigators said.</p>

Saudis attack Riyadh Posted: November 11, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Mike Evans © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com Remarks by the Saudi state-controlled media would cause one to think that Eskimos or Pygmies attacked Riyadh, and that the world should rally to their aid. This followed the suicide bombing on Sunday, Nov. 9, in which 17 were killed and 122 wounded. Saudi officials have attributed the strike to al-Qaida operatives in Riyadh. The most realistic news headline, of course, would be "Saudis Attack Riyadh" – rather than "Al-Qaida Attacks Riyadh" – but that would not be good PR for the world's largest...

Hijackers in same hotel as Saudi minister By David Rennie in Washington (Filed: 03/10/2003) A senior Saudi Arabian official, now minister for the holy places, stayed at the same hotel as three September 11 hijackers the night before the suicide attacks. American investigators are trying to make sense of the disclosure that Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman al-Hussayen, who returned to Saudi Arabia shortly after the attacks, stayed at the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia. Three of the attackers stayed at the hotel that night and crashed a plane into the Pentagon the following day. His nephew's American lawyer, David...

A Saudi national, Omar al-Bayoumi, wanted for questioning about his links to the September 11 hijackers, says he is ready to talk to US officials. He agreed to the interview but only in his homeland, and in the presence of officials from his government. Advertisement On Sunday, al-Bayoumi appeared on Dubai-based Al Arabiya television, saying he had written to the Saudi interior minister telling him he was ready for the questioning. His name was raised in a US congressional report that recounted that he had befriended and helped two of the suicide hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Al-Bayoumi said...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Saudi Arabia's foreign minister says FBI and CIA agents in his country may question an employee of the Saudi civil aviation authority who befriended two of the Saudis involved in the 9-11 hijackings. That concession made, Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal expressed disappointment that President Bush would not declassify parts of a congressional report on the 9-11 hijackings. He said the refusal deprives the Arab kingdom of a chance to clear its name. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi government has asserted it had no involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks....

ASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — An F.B.I. account of the Sept. 11 plot disclosed today that Mohamed Atta, known to other hijackers as the "boss," met monthly with an associate before the attacks. The account also told of how one hijacker coordinated the so-called muscle hijackers who kept passengers on the airliners at bay.The account said a hijacker who crashed into the Pentagon and who was tracked by the Central Intelligence Agency in the months before the attacks, Khalid al-Mihdhar, organized the travel to the United States for the hijackers who helped seize the flights and who in some instances...