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©Associated Press
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 19, 2001
WASHINGTON -- Attorney General John Ashcroft expanded the terrorism investigation Tuesday to include U.S. attorneys in every city as authorities filed the first criminal charges after finding three men in a house with false immigration papers and airport diagrams.
Meanwhile:
Federal authorities said they were investigating the possibility that terrorists may have plotted to commandeer two additional commercial flights on the day that four planes were hijacked and used in attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Law enforcement officials acknowledged that the FBI's efforts to conduct electronic surveillance of foreign terrorists in the United States had been troubled in recent months, spawning an internal inquiry into possible abuses.
The arrests in Michigan occurred when FBI agents raided a residence in Detroit looking for one of the nearly 200 witnesses being sought in the investigation. Instead, they found the three men and a cache of documents. They were charged with having false immigration papers.
Aided by a federal grand jury in New York, the investigation has detained 75 people for questioning and had at least four people under arrest as material witnesses, law enforcement officials said.
The government also announced a new policy that gives immigration authorities 48 hours, or longer in emergencies, to decide whether to charge an alien with status violations, up from 24 hours. Many of those questioned in Tuesday's attack were detained on immigration violations.
The attorney general vowed to use "every legal means at our disposal to prevent further terrorist activity by taking people into custody who have violated the law and who may pose a threat to America."
Ashcroft said publicly for the first time that authorities are studying whether more flights beyond the four that crashed last Tuesday were targeted for hijackings, but noted the possibility had not yet been corroborated.
Law enforcement officials said they were taking the possibility of other hijack targets seriously.
The other Sept. 11 flights under investigation are American Airlines Flight 43 that departed from Newark International Airport about 8:10 a.m. bound for Los Angeles; the plane was forced to land in Cincinnati when all flights were grounded. The other flight was American Airlines 1729 from Newark to San Antonio, Texas, via Dallas that was scheduled to depart at 8:50 a.m. and was forced to land at St. Louis.
The restructuring of the investigation includes the creation of antiterrorism task forces by every U.S. attorney's office.
"These task forces will be a part of a national network that will coordinate the dissemination of information and the development of a strategy to disrupt, dismantle and punish terrorist organizations throughout the country," Ashcroft said.
The effort was being aided by a grand jury in White Plains, N.Y., and officials said other grand juries would likely be used around the country to issue subpoenas and gather evidence.
The three Detroit men were arrested on charges of identity fraud and misuse of visas.
During a search of the men's residence, FBI agents observed a day planner containing notations on the "American base in Turkey," the "American foreign minister" and "Alia Airport," Jordan, according to an FBI affidavit filed in the case.
"The day planner also contained handwritten sketches of what appeared to be a diagram of an airport flight line, to include aircraft and runways," the affidavit said.
Court records said the FBI seized documents suggesting the men worked in food preparation for airlines at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and collected information about an American military base in Turkey, a U.S. foreign minister, an airport in Jordan and diagrams of aircraft location and runways. The affidavit did not explain the reference to "U.S. foreign minister."
Federal documents identified the men as Karim Koubriti, 23; Ahmed Hannan, 33; and Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 21.
At the FBI, the New York Times reported that unnamed Justice Department and FBI officials, who acknowledged the existence of the internal investigation, said the inquiry had forced officials to examine their monitoring of several suspected terrorist groups, among them Al-Qaida, the network led by Osama bin Laden, and Hamas, the militant Palestinian group. Al-Qaida is the group that President Bush and others have cited as that principally suspected in last week's attacks.
Senior FBI and Justice Department officials said that they had not allowed the internal investigation of terrorism-related wiretaps to affect their ability to monitor the activities of Al-Qaida or Hamas. Other officials, however, said the inquiry may have hampered electronic surveillance of terror groups, but this issue remains highly classified.
Among the four material witnesses under arrest Tuesday was Albader Alhazmi, 34, a Saudi national and Saudi-trained doctor who was doing a medical residency in radiology at University of Texas Health Science Center, a law enforcement official said. He was being held in New York.
Alhazmi did not show up for his radiologist job on Sept. 11. He had been working at a military hospital at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, during the week before the attacks, said an official at the medical center.
An unconfirmed link to Iraq emerged Tuesday in the intelligence community.
The Associated Press reported that a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States has received information from a foreign intelligence service that Mohamed Atta, a hijacker aboard one of the planes that slammed into the World Trade Center, met this year in Europe with an Iraqi intelligence agent.
The raw intelligence came in since the attacks last Tuesday and has not yet been corroborated by U.S. authorities, the official said.