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©Washington Post
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 24, 2001
WASHINGTON -- Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States and abroad, according to interviews and court testimony.
Three days after the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, FBI Director Robert Mueller described reports that several of the hijackers had received flight training in the United States as "news, quite obviously," adding, "If we had understood that to be the case, we would have -- perhaps one could have averted this."
However, court documents and interviews with flight school officials suggest the FBI had warning that potential terrorists were using the schools to obtain flight training. A senior government official Saturday acknowledged that law enforcement officials were aware of a number of people with links to bin Laden -- under a dozen, the official said -- who had attended U.S. flight schools, the Washington Post reported. However, the official said there was no information to indicate the flight students had been planning suicide hijacking attacks, the Post reported.
The involvement of terrorists with flight training includes the following:
Two flight school operators said last week that FBI agents visited them in 1996 to obtain information about several Arab pilots connected to a Pakistani terrorist eventually convicted of plotting to bomb U.S. airliners.
The flight schools, Coastal Aviation of New Bern, N.C., and Richmor Aviation of Schenectady, N.Y., were two of four that provided flight training to Abdul Hakim Murad in the early 1990s, according to Philippine authorities. Murad was arrested in Manila in 1995 and later convicted in New York of plotting to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific, then crash a suicide plane into CIA headquarters.
In 1998, FBI agents questioned officials from Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., about a graduate later identified in court testimony as a pilot for bin Laden, according to Dale Davis, the school's director of operations.
FBI agents returned to Norman two weeks before the Sept. 11 attack, seeking information about another Airman student, Davis said, a French-Moroccan dropout who had entered the country on a visa sponsored by the flight school. The man, Zacarias Moussaoui, had been detained in Eagan, Minn., on an immigration violation after he tried to purchase time on a jet simulator -- even though he had never flown solo in a single-engine aircraft.
In addition, court documents from last year's trial of bin Laden associates for the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania contain several references to flight schools and bin Laden pilots.
One government witness, Essam al-Ridi, testified that he had taken classes and taught at the now-defunct Ed Boardman Aviation School in Fort Worth. Al-Ridi also said that in the mid 1990s he purchased a used Saber-40 jet on bin Laden's behalf for $210,000 in Tucson, Ariz. Another witness in the same bombing trial, L'Houssaine Kerchtou, testified that he was sent to a flight school in Nairobi and later served as a pilot for bin Laden.
The issue of how U.S. authorities processed early warning signs that terrorists had infiltrated the flight-school system is certain to be examined in the aftermath of the attack. Suzanne Spaulding, executive director of the National Commission on Terrorism, a congressionally appointed task force, said, "In hindsight, we can see how all these things (flight school connections) might be relevant and important." But, she said, "it is harder on a day-to-day basis. There is no question that technology could help sort information."
Since the attack, the FBI has extended its investigation to dozens of flight schools, including some of the same schools it visited in the years before the attack. According to law enforcement officials and media reports, the 19 suspected terrorists received flight training from at least 10 U.S. flight schools. At least 44 people sought by the FBI for questioning received some flight instruction. Dietrich Snell, who helped prosecute Murad, said that although the Pakistani terrorist attended four U.S. flight schools, it would have been difficult for the FBI to connect the schools to the kind of attack that occurred Sept. 11.
Murad, he said, had indicated that he wanted to use his flight training to become a commercial pilot until he was recruited by Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a bin Laden operative who also plotted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
"I think that because Murad had been trained as a pilot it's tempting in hindsight to say that the bureau should have known," said Snell. "But I think they were missing any link that would have connected the flight schools to this kind of terrorism."
The Murad investigation showed that Murad and Yousef were planning to employ five-man teams to smuggle bombs on to 12 planes operated by United Airlines, Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines during a two-day period in 1995. Murad told authorities that part of his planned role in the terror attack was to crash a plane into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.
Richard Kaylor, manager of Richmor Aviation, said the FBI was first alerted to the Schenectady flight school after a Richmor business card was discovered in Murad and Yousef's Manila apartment.
Kaylor said two FBI agents came to interview him about Murad in 1996. He said he provided information about Murad and two other student pilots, both of whom lived with Murad. Kaylor said the three men had come to Schenectady after a stint at Alpha Tango Flying Services in San Antonio.
Kaylor said four FBI agents returned Friday to Richmor to question him about a Turkish student who had received his private pilot's license last year. But Kaylor said it was unclear whether the agents were aware that he had been interviewed five years earlier.
Whether officials at Alpha Tango were also interviewed in 1996 is unclear. The flight school's owner, Hamid Afzal, could not be reached. After the Sept. 11 attack, Afzal contacted the FBI about names on a published list of suspects, thinking some of the hijackers might also have taken instruction at Alpha Tango, according to a report in the San Antonio Express-News.