Telephone for bin Laden.
Also linked to the terrorist leader is Ziyad Khaleel, the onetime resident of east Orange who ordered and purchased the satellite phone used by bin Laden and his associates before and after the 1998 embassy bombings, according to court testimony.
Ali and Khaleel -- both naturalized U.S. citizens -- did meet at a local mosque, a Khaleel relative who still lives in Orlando told the Orlando Sentinel Friday.
"They knew each other," the relative said.
He said the pair met during prayer sessions at the Islamic Society of Central Florida in east Orange County but did not socialize.According to testimony during the four-month trial of the embassy bombings -- which resulted in four convictions of suspected bombers and plotters -- Khaleel ordered a "Compact M" satellite phone from a Long Island-based company for $7,500. Khaleel's credit card was used to purchase more than 2,000 minutes of airtime used by bin Laden for calls right up to the week preceding the embassy bombings.
The phone was shipped to a bin Laden associate in London who forwarded it to Afghanistan in 1996. That associate -- Khaled Al-Fawwaz -- is awaiting extradition to the United States as a co-defendant in the embassy bombings case.
Khaleel's relative told the Sentinel the Palestinian-born Khaleel was motivated by money, not politics, when he bought the phone in 1996. He said he doubts the man had direct ties to bin Laden.
"The FBI came to my house and asked me some questions," he said. "I told them, 'If he did it, he did it for the money not for the cause of Allah.' "
The relative also said Khaleel was detained in December 1999 by authorities in Amman, Jordan, who were asked by the FBI to round up suspects before the Millenium celebration on Dec. 31, 1999.
"They kept him three or four days until the New Year passed," he said.
At the time, federal agencies described Khaleel as a "procurement agent" who was providing evidence about bin Laden's U.S. network.
Public records obtained by the Sentinel show Khaleel lived in the Orlando area for about a year before he was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in New York in 1999. He told what he knew about the satellite phone and was released, the relative said.
Shortly thereafter, he left the country with his wife and young daughter and took a computer-programming job in Saudi Arabia. He has not returned to the United States, according to the relative.
"He doesn't have any hatred toward Americans," the relative said. "In my two years with him, I never heard him say anything bad."
Local links to hijackers.
Even as investigators pursue a list of more than 100 possible suspects, associates and witnesses, they've been hampered by confusion over identities of many of them. The Saudi Arabian Embassy now says up to seven of the 19 names on the suspected hijackers list may be stolen identities. FBI officials acknowledged late last week that some of the hijackers may have been using assumed names or stolen identities.
That only adds to the seemingly impenetrable complexity of the probe in Florida.
For instance, federal agents are investigating the possibility that suspected hijacker Mohamed Atta also had family ties in Central Florida.
A South Florida federal grand jury issued subpoenas to Broward County court officials seeking records involving several people named Atta. They include Majed Atta, the former Winter Garden grocer.
Until the middle of this year, Majed Atta ran the Rainbow Grocery on Plant Street in Winter Garden. On Aug. 1, he and his family packed their belongings into a U-Haul and left their rental home near Lake Apopka. Majed Atta's former landlady said they moved just one week after Atta said he planned to buy the home from her and open a new grocery store in the Orlando area.
FBI agents said they do not yet know whether Majed Atta is related to Mohamed Atta or has any connection to the case.
Mohammad Mahmoud Al-Raqqad, the man arrested in New Jersey in the nationwide dragnet thrown out after the attacks, also has ties to Florida. But like many of those picked up since the attacks, it's not clear why authorities were seeking him.
Al-Raqqad, 37, was one of three men arrested outside the Newark, N. J., airport three days after the attacks. The hijacked jetliner that crashed in Pennsylvania left from Newark.
Authorities said the three men reportedly were carrying $11,000 and a single one-way ticket to Syria.
Authorities in New Jersey found abandoned a green 1993 Ford Taurus owned by Al-Raqqad. He purchased that car in March from Zach's Auto Sales in Palm Bay.
Dealership owner Teresa Elgamil remembered Al-Raqqad because he put down $1,100 in cash for the car and "he was very arrogant."
Elgamil said Al-Raqqad was clean-cut and well-educated, and said he was visiting from abroad.
Al-Raqqad's drivers license listed an address at a Titusville apartment, but no one there remembered him or recognized his photo.
The car he bought in Palm Bay was registered to an address in Morriston, a small town in rural Levy County, southwest of Gainesville. Police and a clerk at a BP Quick Save convenience store on U.S. Highway 27 in East Williston said Al-Raqqad worked there for a few weeks. The clerk said Al-Raqqad left the area six months ago.
Also still in custody is Hady Omar, the Egyptian immigrant who recently had the Orlando apartment near the Holy Land theme park. He apparently was linked to Mohamed Atta and two other dead hijackers through an airline reservation made from a computer terminal at a Kinko's copy shop in South Florida and was picked up for questioning in Arkansas last week.
Omar's wife, Candy Kjosa, said her husband was being questioned in connection with the hijackings but was not involved. Omar, who came to the United States from Egypt two years ago, moved to Boca Raton without his wife and daughter in May.
Omar and a man he worked with in Boca Raton, identified as Walid Hamad, had rented the apartment in Orlando this summer. The two were looking for a piece of property to open an antique shop, Omar's wife said, but they recently broke the lease on the apartment.
How all these men came to be in Central Florida, what they really did here and whether they ultimately will be connected to the hijackings remains to be seen. With so many leads being followed, and so much confusion over who is whom, they may just fade into history much as they once faded into the booming and increasingly anonymous landscape of Central Florida.
"With all the new housing, nobody knows their neighbor and nobody talks to anybody," said Mark Williams, a retired counterterrorism consultant in the Tampa area who worked closely with government task forces in Washington for seven years. "So when these guys come in, they don't raise any suspicion."
What used to be a small world, after all, is not so small anymore.
David Damron and Jim Stratton of the Sentinel staff also contributed to this report. Pedro Ruz Gutierrez, Roger Roy and Jim Leusner can be reached at 407-420-5411.
I'll post some more from my archives regarding this "Orlando connection" in this thread also.
It appears that a lot of those sand bastard terrorists are in my neck of the woods, here in central Florida.
It's easy for them to fit in here with all the immigrants and tourists.