A Second Strike?
- Authorities Move To Ease Fears About Rumors Of Saturday Attack
- Man Arrested In Chicago Being Held On Knife Charge
- Investigators: Some Hijackers Used Fake ID's, True Names Unknown
WASHINGTON, Sept. 20, 2001
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| AP |
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The wreckage of the World Trade Center
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(CBS) Reports are circulating that the terrorist hijackers and some accomplices were planning another action this Saturday, but officials say that although they don't totally discount the possibility they have no firm evidence that is the case.
The concern was prompted by the fact that a couple of the dead hijackers and a very small number of people on the watch list had booked flights for that date.
Florida Democrat Senator Bob Graham said Wednesday, last week's attacks were "part of a larger plan with other terrorism acts, not necessarily hijacking of airplanes."
Graham, also the chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, said "those acts were going to occur in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world."
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| Mohamed Atta |
Of all the hijackers, Atta appears to have traveled the most extensively. Investigators believe that if the terrorist cell had a leader, this was likely the man. A native of Egypt, Atta lived and traveled extensively in Italy and Germany where he obtained a master's degree from a Hamburg technical school in 1999. Last year, he got his pilot's license in Venice, Fla., and in January, he reportedly traveled from Miami to Madrid, then back to Germany, before returning to the U.S. in July. While in Hamburg, neighbors say he often met with a group of seven or other eight men.
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He said the terrorism plans could have included such acts as "putting a chemical in a city's water system, or blowing up a bridge in a major urban centre."
A man on the FBI list of people wanted for questioning in the terrorism investigation was captured outside Chicago, the FBI said Thursday.
Nabil Al-Marabh 34, was arrested Wednesday night in suburban Justice by police and FBI agents, FBI spokeswoman Mary Muha said. She said he was being held on a warrant issued in Boston in March, charging assault with a knife.
Federal agents had been looking for him since at least Monday. That day, they raided a Detroit house with Al-Marabh's name on the mailbox and arrested three men after discovering false visas, passports and other ID, as well as what appeared to be a diagram of an airport flight line.
Officials say first indications are he was not involved in the attack, but they want to make sure, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.
In other developments, officials now confirm "several of the hijackers apparently had false identifications" and their true names are still not known. Some of the identification appears reportedly was stolen from law-abiding Saudi Arabian citizens.
There is no evidence thus far that the 19 dead hijackers ever met as a group. Agents, instead, have found they clustered together in four and five man teams around Boston, Newark and Washington just before the hijackings.
Meanwhile, federal investigators believe that some of the pilots and co-pilots of the four hijacked aircraft last week were murdered before the planes crashed. But investigators will not disclose what leads them to that conclusion.
FBI technicians have also recovered fragments of conversations from within one of the doomed cockpits — much of it is described however as "a jumbled mixture of grunts and screams."
Officials say reconstructing details of how the planes were taken over is important not from an evidentiary standpoint, but a preventive one.
They confirm, for example, that the bodies of two stewardesses from United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, were found with their hands bound. And they theorize the pilots from that flight and others may have left their cockpit seats when they saw stewardesses being slashed with box knives.
U.S. officials have already confirmed they believe hijacker Muhammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Europe early this year. Atta, 33, is believed to have been the cell leader of the 19 hijackers, although investigators have no concrete proof of that thus far. Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri denied his country was involved.
Ashcroft has directed the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to revise its regulations to allow longer detentions of aliens, including those taken into custody during the investigation.
He said new rules will allow suspected illegal immigrants to be detained for 48 hours, instead of 24 hours, added that a new anti-terrorism task force will have links to every major U.S. city. Some 200 people are wanted for questioning, the FBI said. Seventy-five people are in custody for immigration violations. Four have been arrested as material witnesses.
Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath were plucked from a train in Texas after their flight landed prematurely following Tuesday's attack. Zacarias Moussaoui — perhaps the most promising suspect — was arrested before the attacks last month when he tried to get flight simulator training in Minnesota. Little is known about the fourth man, Albador Alhazmi, a radiologist in San Antonio.
Pilot training is a central theme of the massive investigation into Tuesday's attacks. Several of the 19 hijackers whose names were released by the FBI Friday were pilots and had gone to aviation schools in Florida.
Besides Atta, the hijackers who were believed to be pilots included Hani Hajour, who was on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon; Wail Alshehri and Abdulaziz Alomari, who were on one of the Boston flights; Marwan Al-Shehhi, hijacking on United Flight 175 out of Boston and Ziad Jarrahi, who flew on United Flight 93 out of Newark, N.J., which crashed in a field 80 miles from Pittsburgh.
© MMI, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press and Reuters Limited contributed to this report.
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