MIAMI - A federal judge ruled Thursday that an Egyptian man accused of smuggling Middle Easterners into the United States can be transported from Miami to Washington, D.C., to face charges.
Federal agents arrested Ashraf Ahmed Abdallah, 35, last Friday at Miami International Airport during a stopover between Ecuador and Egypt. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary Michael J. Garcia said Abdallah was one of his agency's most wanted "human smuggling kingpins" in the world.
A December 2001 indictment unsealed last Friday accuses Abdallah of smuggling three Egyptians and one Jordanian through Latin American countries, including Guatemala, where he lived. He faces a minimum mandatory sentence of five years in prison.
Officials allege no terrorism connections but say Abdallah smuggled people from countries with known terrorism networks.
WASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, operating from hideouts suspected to be along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, are directing a Qaeda effort to launch an attack in the United States sometime this year, senior Bush Administration officials said on Thursday.
"What we know about this most recent information is that it is being directed from the senior-most levels of the Al Qaeda organization," said a senior official at a briefing for reporters. He added, "We know that this leadership continues to operate along the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan."
Counterterrorism officials have said for weeks that they are increasingly worried by a continuing stream of intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda wanted to carry out a significant terror attack on United States soil this year. But until the comments of the senior administration officials on Thursday, it was not clear that Mr. bin Laden and top deputies like Ayman Zawahiri were responsible for the concern.
Another senior administration official said on Thursday that the intelligence reports - apparently drawn partly from interviews with captured Qaeda members and partly from other intelligence, referred to efforts "to inflict catastrophic effects" before the election.
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