Scapegoats Or Real McCoys?

WASHINGTON

Federal authorities claim to have identified as many as 50 people who supported orcarried out the strikes on the World Trade Tower and the Pentagon, according to the LosAngeles Times.

While investigators are said to have accounted for 40 of those involved, 10 remain atlarge, the report said. Agents searching cars and apartments up and down theEast Coast have apparently found suicide notes in New York that some of the hijackers wrote to their parents.

They are also said to have recovered credit card receipts which reveal that some of thehijackers paid for flight training in the US. A federal agent disclosed thatauthorities believe that in all 27 from the group received various kinds ofpilot training.

On Tuesday morning, hijackers had ploughed in two hijacked planes into the twin towers of the TWC. A third jetliner later crashed into the Pentagon while thefourth hijacked aircraft crashed in western Pennsylvania.

Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer disclosed that the government hadreliable information that the aircraft which struck the Pentagon "wasoriginally intended to hit the White House." Another possible target,Fleischer said, was Air Force One.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said the FBI had mobilized 4,000 agents and3,000 support personnel. The investigation reached from Maine to Florida andacross the nation to California. Ashcroft called it "Perhaps the mostmassive and intensive investigation ever conducted in America."

Ashcroft said authorities have uncovered "numerous credible leads"by  questioning people and serving search warrants from Maine to thesouthern end of Florida. The Attorney General said there were three to sixhijackers on each of the four planes.

Though FBI Director Robert Mueller said there have been no arrests, theagency has detained several people for immigration violations. One detainee wasbeing held as a material witness.

Law enforcement and intelligence officials said the suspects, who carriedMiddle-Eastern passports, belonged to four independent cells.

Many of the hijackers, who wielded knives and box cutters and made bombthreats once on board, have been identified. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison saidthe men carried passports from two nations. Declining to name the nations, shesaid both are in the Middle East.

Lewis Schiliro, the former assistant FBI director in charge of the New Yorkfield office from 1998 to April 2000, said hundreds of agents in citiesnationwide used that information to develop background "on those who stoodout: who they were, where they stayed, who they called, who sponsored them, whatphone calls they made."

Schiliro said agents pulled INS files, looked for links between thepassengers listed on the hijacked planes and examined footage from dozens ofcameras at the three airports where the terrorists boarded the aircraft.

Federal law enforcement sources said scores of subpoenas were issued andsearches were approved and conducted by late Wednesday, under the secrecy of theForeign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Within hours of the attacks, agents talked to the families of nearly everypassenger listed on the four airliners' lists, isolated those who could not bevouched for by their friends and relatives, and pulled their bank, credit cardand phone records, as well as their immigration and naturalization papers ifthey were from another country.

Authorities said two of the suspected hijackers entered the country on workvisas. They began learning to fly last summer at the Huffman AviationInternational in Venice, according to their flight instructor, their landlordand law enforcement officials.

FBI agents searched at least three flight schools in Florida - Embry-RiddleAeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Huffman and Flight SafetyInternational in Vero Beach. Agents also searched unidentified flight schools inSouthern California.

In addition, agents were also retracing the steps of the suspects whoattended flight schools in Vero Beach, Pompano Beach and Daytona Beach.

One senior FBI official in Washington complained that "there are lots offlight schools out there. You don't have to be accredited to fly, and they don'tdo any background checks on people who want to learn how to fly." FBIagents were drawn to Huffman after finding its name and an Arabic-languageflight manual in a car left at Logan International Airport in Boston, from whichtwo of the planes took off on Tuesday before being hijacked.

The Huffman school is about 25 years old and handles about 800 students ayear. It is a small building on the edge of the Venice airport, and 75% to 80%of his students are foreigners who come to the US to learn flying because itcosts less.

According to Rudi Dekkers of the Huffman Aviation International flight schoolsaid that two students, Amanullah Atta Mohammed and "Marwan," paid$10,000 each by cheque to attend his school from July to November 2000.

Dekkers said that his school trains fliers for single-or small-engineaircraft and that the two men needed such a certificate to qualify for trainingto fly jets.

Realizing that two of the hijackers may have passed through his school,Dekkers said, "I feel terrible. I feel worse than anyone." Detective.Sergeant Mike Treanor of the Venice Police Department said that FBI had obtainedthe two suspects' school records from the Huffman school and Charles Voss' homeand identified them as two who it is believed flew the hijacked jets.

It remained unclear how or when the men arrived in this country, but Treanorsaid that they appeared to have the proper papers when they enrolled at theHuffman school.

"They had to show them work visas and passports and all the properID," Treanor said, "and they had all that." "This one man,Atta," said Treanor, "was confirmed on one of the planes that hit thetowers."

Voss, the school bookkeeper, and his wife, Dru, took the two men in asboarders in their south Venice home for a couple weeks in July.

Dru said the men appeared to be in their 30s and were very secretive,claiming to be from Germany. She said that she and her husband eventuallyevicted them because they were unkempt and did not keep their bedroom clean.

In Vero Beach, FBI agents questioned neighbours about several Middle-Easternmen who were reportedly taking classes at the nearby flight school. Eight agentsshowed up at Hank Habora's house Wednesday morning and questioned him about hisnext-door neighbour. "They gave me a photo and asked if this was the guy,and I said yes."

Habora said he knew the man as "John." FAA records show that aSaudi Arabian flight engineer named Amer Mohammed Kamfar listed the address ashis home. The man lived in the house with his wife and four children fromFebruary until two or three weeks ago, when he "left in a hurry" in agreen van, Habora said.

He said the man often wore the uniform of student pilots at nearbyFlightSafety, a school that frequently trains foreign pilots on jumbo jets.

About eight miles away, agents questioned Kenneth Reams about twoMiddle-Eastern families who lived on his Vero Beach street. "My wifethought they were gone," said Reams, 72. "She hasn't seen the childrenin weeks."

The men had been renting the houses for more than a year, Reams said, livingthere with their wives and children. "They seemed to be nice."

The owner of one of the houses, Llonald Mixell, said the tenant moved outwith his wife and at least three children a week before the hijackings.

Mixell said the tenant, whose name he refused to divulge, was acommercial  pilot from Saudi Arabia who was getting advanced training atFlightSafety.

The tenant who leased the house from Mixell was a man named AbdulrahmanAlomari, a pilot from Saudi Arabia.

The house next door was leased by Adnan Zakana Bukhari, another Saudi pilot,records show.

In Boston, federal agents, bomb specialists, firefighters and police officersstaged a dramatic midday raid on the Westin Copley Place hotel.

Wearing black hoods and heavy bulletproof vests, agents carried batteringrams, AR-15 firearms and fiber-optic equipment, which can check under doors.

They took into custody three people, who were later released.

In Newton, Massachusetts, just west of Boston, officers converged on the ParkInn at Chestnut Hill. They seized a car containing flight manuals and aninstruction book on how to fly a Boeing 767.

In Maine, an aide to Governor Angus King said a silver Nissan withMassachusetts license plates was impounded at the Portland airport. The vehiclewas taken to a state crime lab in Augusta for examination by the FBI.

A cigarette found near the car will be tested for DNA, the aide said.

King's office said two of the suspects in the WTC attack are believed to haveentered Maine by ferry from Nova Scotia.

Using New Jersey driver's licenses for identification, the men apparentlyflew to Boston early Tuesday from the Portland International Jetport, theGovernor's office said.

Investigators in Portland believe the suspects may have boarded a USAirflight to Boston early Tuesday.