Free Republic

A Saudi family who “fled” their Sarasota area home weeks before 9/11 had “many connections” to “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001,” according to newly released FBI records. One partially declassified document, marked “secret,” lists three of those individuals and ties them to the Venice, Fla., flight school where suicide hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi trained. Accomplice Ziad Jarrah took flying lessons at another school a block away. Atta and al-Shehhi were at the controls of the jetliners that slammed into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 people. Jarrah was the...

TERROR plotter Zacarias Moussaoui told a Muslim militant he dreamed of crashing a plane into the White House, according to testimony at the al-Qaeda conspirator's death penalty trial today. Singapore-born Faiz Abu Bakar Bafana, a member of the radical Indonesia-based group Jemaah Islamiah, said in testimony recorded in 2002 that he hosted a man he knew only as "John" in Kuala Lumpur in mid-2000, who told him of the dream. Jurors later saw Bafana assert during cross-examination that "John" was Moussaoui. Moussaoui is the first person tried in the US in connection with the September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed...

STAMFORD — A man was being held by immigration authorities after patrons at a busy downtown restaurant said they saw him park illegally and quickly walk away, police said. The restaurant and an adjacent office building were evacuated Thursday evening. A search of the car turned up aviation-related documents including flight charts, schematics of airport terminals and runways and information on flight lessons, said police Capt. Richard Conklin. The Joint Terrorism Task Force, comprised of the FBI and other federal and state agencies, planned to question the man, Conklin said Friday. "The aviation materials piqued our interest," Conklin said. "He...