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WETHERSFIELD, Conn. (AP) _ A burning body found near a strip mall Dumpster was 40-year-old Philip Hurley of Rocky Hill, Wethersfield police said Thursday. Hurley's body was found in a trash bin behind a video store on the Silas Deane Highway Wednesday night. Wethersfield police and firefighters responded to a call about the Dumpster fire just after 8:30 p.m. They soon determined that it was a body that was on fire. Hurley was a 13-year employee of the state Department of Information Technology and a part-time employee at a liquor store in the strip mall. The body was burned beyond...

Heard on the local police scanner in Lawrenceburg, TN. Three men, who appeared to be of Middle East origin, were in a maroon Plymouth sitting by the cities water supply.

'No hoax' - bomb found outside county morgue By Yolanda Jones yojones@gomemphis.com A bomb and two smaller explosive-type devices were found Wednesday morning in the stairwell outside of the Shelby County Regional Forensic Center on Madison, which houses the morgue and the Medical Examiner's Office. "This was no hoax," said Gene Marquez, resident agent in charge of the Memphis federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms office. "This was the real deal." A cleaning man found the devices sitting in an aluminum pan on the west side of the building at 1060 Madison about 10 a.m. He said he thought it was...

A janitor found three explosive devices late Wednesday morning at the Regional Forensic Center building at 1060 Madison.The devices #151; a primary device and two secondary devices #151; were found in a stairwell about 10 a.m.Officials said the devices were not a quot;hoax.quot; The devices were in an aluminum pan. The janitor initially thought someone had left his food in the stairwell.The police Bomb Squad was called to the building. Employees were evacuated, and Madison Avenue and the Interstate 240 Madison exit ramp was blocked to traffic.Also on the scene were units from the Fire Department and federal ATF agents.A...

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- Five Middle Eastern men pleaded innocent Wednesday to federal charges that they tried to illegally get Tennessee driver's licenses. The defendants were arrested Feb. 5 along with Katherine Smith, 49, a Tennessee driver's license examiner who died five days later in a car fire authorities say was intentionally set. A medical examiner's report on the cause of her death is pending, and authorities are still investigating. Kahled Odtllah, 31, Sakher Hammad, 24, Mostafa Said Abou-Shahin, 25, Abdelmuhsen Mahmid Hammad, 31, and Mohammed Fares, 19, are charged with conspiring to illegally produce identification documents. They face up ...

Tennessee Highway Patrol investigators found no evidence that driver's license examiner Katherine Smith tried to stop her car or take any evasive action Feb. 10 as her car veered off U.S 72. THP investigators reconstructed the fiery crash that killed Smith the day before she was to appear at a detention hearing in U.S. Magistrate Court on charges that she and five New York City men conspired to fraudulently obtain Tennessee driver's licenses. Smith, 49, was driving a 1992 Acura Legend registered to Khaled Odtllah, one of the men arrested on Feb. 5. Federal investigators have said the fire was ...

Tennessee State Highway report confirms crash did not kill woman who died in flaming car WOODY BAIRD, Associated Press WriterTuesday, March 5, 2002 ©2002 Associated Press URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2002/03/05/national2227EST0835.DTL (03-05) 19:27 PST MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) -- A state Highway Patrol report released Tuesday confirmed a driver's license examiner charged in a bogus license scheme was not killed by the impact of her car ramming into a utility pole last month. Investigators are still awaiting a coroner's report on the cause of Katherine Smith's death. Smith, 49, was found Feb. 10 burned beyond recognition in her car about 20 miles from her ...

The head of a Hispanic civil rights organization says she knows of six or seven incidents over the past two years in which illegal aliens paid an unidentified state driver's license bureau employee in Memphis to obtain fake identification. The assertion by Dilka Roman, Tennessee director of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), comes as authorities continue to investigate the mysterious death last month of a driver's license examiner linked to a license-selling scheme. Roman said she reported some of what she knew to Memphis police several months before the FBI opened an investigation this winter into an ...

Driver's Licenses To Be Easier For Foreigners Governor Plans To Sign Bill Thursday Posted: 8:53 a.m. MST February 28, 2002SANTA FE, N.M. -- It will soon be easier for Mexicans and other foreigners living in the state to get a driver's license. A measure to allow the Motor Vehicle Division to accept documents other than a Social Security number as identification when someone applies for a New Mexico driver's license is before Gov. Johnson. Johnson plans to sign the bill Thursday during a ceremony in his office. Supporters said the measure will help people from Mexico who are living and ...

Five New York City men with ties to the Middle East were indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday for their part in an alleged scheme to fraudulently obtain Tennessee driver's licenses. In the indictment on one count of conspiracy to commit fraud, federal authorities shed no new light on the death of state license examiner Katherine Smith. Smith and the five men were charged in a Feb. 6 criminal complaint on an identical conspiracy charge. Smith died Feb. 10 in a fiery car crash on U.S. 72 in Fayette County, the day before she was to appear at a ...

CNSNews.com) - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested a New Jersey man identified as a part of a fake identification ring that included two of the Sept. 11 hijackers.The FBI has charged Abdel Rahman Omar Tawfiq Alfauru, an illegal immigrant from Jordan, with producing false identification. It is alleged that Alfauru, who was living in Clifton, N.J., had obtained bogus identification similar to that of Hani Hanjour, one of the suspected hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into Tower 1 of the World Trade Center.The FBI has released information that it had interviewed Alfauru on Oct. 1. ...

WASHINGTON - Mohamed Atta, who piloted the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, was able to get a Florida driver's license by showing authorities his Egyptian driver's license. In Virginia, Hanji Hanjour and Khalid Almihdbar, two other hijackers, got driver's licenses after paying $100 to a stranger who swore they were Virginia residents. And according to the testimony of a Memphis FBI agent, at least one of the New York men recently arrested on charges of bribing a Tennessee driver's license examiner picked Tennessee because it no longer required aliens to show any proof they were in the ...

FBI investigating ‘mass destruction’ inquiry By Rick Russell Senior Reporter February 21, 2002 Federal and local authorities are investigating a man who approached a University of Memphis professor last week seeking information about weapons of mass destruction. The professor, who wished to remain anonymous, said a man of Middle Eastern descent approached him while he was in his office Feb. 13 and asked for a “crash course in the physics that deals with mass destruction.” In return, the man told the professor he would pay him money for the requested information. “He told me that money was no object, and ...

Proposed legislation requiring more documents from immigrants applying for Tennessee driver's licenses would make roads more dangerous, licensing centers more stressful and the nation no more secure. That's the position of the Department of Safety, said Roland Colson, executive assistant to Commissioner Denny W. King. "We do not have any legislative effort at this point in time directed toward changing any of the rules," Colson said. The General Assembly last year passed a law making it unnecessary for immigrants applying for a driver's license to show a Social Security number. But opponents are pushing for repeal this year, often citing ...

Mourners remember the good deeds of license examiner, not how she died By Clay Bailey bailey@gomemphis.com By A. J. Wolfe The body of driver's license examiner Katherine Smith is carried to a waiting hearse following her funeral at the Family Funeral Care Summer Avenue Chapel Saturday. Mourners filled the Family Funeral Care chapel Saturday to talk about the good deeds and Christian life of Katherine Smith, balancing the publicity surrounding her fiery death last week and the charge that she sold fraudulent driver's licenses. About 175 people created a standing-room-only arrangement in the chapel, at times swaying and singing ...

FBI checking 5 in illegal-license cases for possible al-Qaida links By LENNY SAVINO Knight Ridder Newspapers MEMPHIS, Tenn. - The FBI is investigating whether four New York men and one from Tennessee who are in custody here for illegally purchasing Tennessee driver's licenses may be members of an al-Qaida terrorist cell that helped survey New York's World Trade Center for the Sept. 11 hijackers. When one of the men, Sakhera "Rocky" Hammad, was arrested, FBI agents found a security pass from the Trade Center dated Sept. 5. Agents also have learned that Hammad drove from New York to Memphis on ...

MEMPHIS, Tenn., Feb 16, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- Shortly before 1 a.m. last Sunday, witnesses saw flames erupt from the back seat of a 1992 Acura Legend as it crawled along a two-lane road skirting farm fields in the little Tennessee town of Piperton. The driver breathed in the flames, her lungs searing, as the car veered off the road and came to rest against a utility pole near the Mississippi state line. There were no skid marks or furrows in the grass to indicate the driver had hit the brakes. A witness rushed up and pulled ...

The fiery death of a driver's license examiner at the center of a federal fraud investigation was not an accident, an FBI agent said here Wednesday in federal court. Federal and state investigators found gasoline on the clothes Katherine Smith was wearing when she died Sunday in a car crash on a stretch of U.S. 72 in Fayette County, FBI agent J. Suzanne Nash told U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Daniel Breen. Nash also testified that investigators found evidence of some kind of accelerant in the burned-out interior of Smith's car. "Katherine Smith obviously lived two lives, maybe more. She may ...

<p>The focus of an investigation into a fraudulent driver's license scheme with possible terrorism ties has shifted to the mysterious death of a chief suspect, whose car went up in flames a day before her court hearing.</p> <p>Katherine Smith, 49, was found burned beyond recognition early Sunday in a car crash that a prosecutor described as "most unusual and suspicious." Her arraignment in federal court was scheduled for Monday.</p>

<p>Federal authorities have "ratcheted up" an investigation into suspicions of money-laundering, weapons violations, and other aiding and abetting of terrorist groups by a militant sect of black Muslims that is operating out of rural communes throughout the United States.</p> <p>The investigation is based on surveillance of activities between a Muslim settlement in southern Virginia and a suspected Middle Eastern terrorist leader.</p>