By Karen Gullo THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
September 13, 2001
Massive probe: Spots in Florida, East searched
WASHINGTON — Federal authorities have identified more than a dozen hijackers of Middle Eastern descent in Tuesday's bombings and gathered evidence linking them to Osama bin Laden and other terrorist networks, law enforcement officials said.
The massive investigation stretched from the Canadian border, where officials suspect some of the hijackers entered the country, to Florida, where some of the participants are believed to have learned how to fly commercial jetliners before the attacks. Locations in Massachusetts and Florida were searched for evidence.
The names of two men being sought by authorities emerged in Florida. There, the FBI interviewed a family that gave them temporary shelter a year ago.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told THE ASSOCIATED PRESS that multiple cells of terrorist groups participated and that hijackers had possible ties to countries that included Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The identities of more than a dozen of the men who hijacked four planes with knives and threats of bombs has been ascertained, the officials said. Several hijackers had pilot's licenses.
Trained in U.S.
At least one hijacker on each of the four planes was trained at a U.S. flight school, said Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker. The flight schools were in Florida and at least one other state. The hijackers used both cash and credit cards to purchase their plane tickets and hotel rooms.
Authorities detained at least a half dozen people in Massachusetts and Florida on unrelated local warrants and immigration charges and were questioning them about their possible ties to the hijackers. No charges related to the attacks had been filed.
Search warrants were executed in Florida, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Sealed warrants went out in several other states, officials said.
"We're attempting to recreate the travels of each of the hijackers on the planes — either the hijackers themselves or their associates," FBI Director Robert Mueller said.
For some of the suspected accomplices, "we have information as to involvement with individual terrorist groups," Mueller added. He declined to say which groups or whether they were connected to bin Laden.
Officials said authorities were gathering evidence that the terrorist cells may have had prior involvement in earlier plots against the United States, and may have been involved with bin Laden. That includes the USS Cole bombing in Yemen and the foiled attack on U.S. soil during the millennium celebrations.
"This could have been the result of several terrorist kingpins working together. We're investigating that possibility," one law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity told THE ASSOCIATED PRESS.
Sen. Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said the briefing he received Wednesday from law enforcement left him with the same impression.
"Most of it today points to bin Laden but the speculation at the end of the road is that he and his network were very much involved with Hezbollah, Fatah and other" terrorist organizations, Grassley said.
The senator said authorities told him all the hijackers were of Middle Eastern descent and that they had "a tremendous amount of ground support for each hijacker."
Seeking two cars
A Venice, Fla., man said FBI agents told him that two men who stayed in his home while training at a local flight school were involved in the attacks. Charlie Voss, a former employee at Huffman Aviation in Venice said the FBI told him one of the men was named Mohamed Atta. A student at Huffman Aviation identified the second man as Marwan Alshehhi.
The FBI in Miami issued a national bulletin for law enforcement agencies to look out for two cars. Records with the Florida Division of Motor Vehicles show that one of the vehicles the FBI was pursuing — a 1989 red Pontiac — was registered to Atta, who previously had a driver's license in Egypt.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said numerous promising leads were being followed up. "The Department of Justice has undertaken perhaps the most massive and intensive investigation ever conducted in this country," he said.
Ashcroft said authorities were conducting interviews and reviewing airline manifests, rental car records and pay phone records. He said between three and six hijackers, armed with knives and box cutters, seized control of the four commercial jets. Two hit New York's World Trade Center, a third smashed into the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania.
Some 4,000 special agents and 3,000 support personnel are assisting in the investigation, and 400 FBI laboratory specialists are at the crime scenes in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Evidence has been collected at the Pentagon and Pennsylvania site, but investigators have not yet been able to start work at the World Trade Center, where the search for survivors continued.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they were investigating whether one group of hijackers crossed the Canadian border at a checkpoint and made their way to Boston, where an American Airlines flight was hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center.
September 13, 2001 Posted: 12:06 p.m. EDT (1606 GMT)
President Bush talks from the White House with New York Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
(CNN) -- In a conference call with New York Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Rudy Giuliani, President Bush said he would visit New York City Friday to view the devastation from Tuesday's terror attacks.
He told Pataki and Giuliani that America was enveloped in a "quiet anger" and said: "We will win this war." After his phone call, Bush and first lady Laura Bush visited some of the injured and the medical personnel at a Washington hospital.
The president's comments came as airports across the nation reopened and investigators pressed their manhunt for those involved in the hijacking and crashes of four commercial jets on Tuesday -- two that destroyed the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center and a third that slammed into the western wall of the Pentagon in Washington.
Latest developments
• Officials in southwestern Pennsylvania said they have identified and cordoned off a second debris site about 6 to 8 miles away from the crash site of United Flight 93, the fourth hijacked plane in Tuesday's terror attack. Cell phone calls from passengers aboard the plane indicated the hijackers may have had a bomb and also that they were planning to try to retake the plane from the terrorists.
• The Pentagon says that an estimated 190 people died in the Pentagon crash; the highest ranking officer was a three-star army general. The figure included the 64 passengers and crewmembers on the plane.
• Giuliani says that the number of missing in New York has now topped 4,760. The mayor said that 94 bodies have been recovered, 46 of them identified.
• Rescuers in New York are searching for a survivor who contacted authorities via cell phone early Thursday morning. The survivor is believed to be in the basement of the northern World Trade Center tower.
• One of two brothers who had been identified by federal authorities as possible hijackers involved in the terrorist attacks is alive and cooperating with the FBI, sources said. Federal sources initially had identified Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Bukhari as possible hijackers who had boarded one of the planes that originated in Boston. Bukhari's attorney, however, said that Adnan Bukhari was not involved and that Ameer Bukhari died in a small plane crash last year. The attorney said that the brothers' identification had been stolen.
• New York authorities fear the building at 1 Liberty Street and the Millennium Hotel could still collapse.
• Authorities shut down New York's Staten Island at 8 a.m. on Thursday to begin a "grid search" for a vehicle.
• Bomb-sniffing dogs were sweeping through the Pentagon Thursday morning as employees at the Washington D.C.-area facility returned to work. (
• German police said they had detained a male airport worker and have brought in a woman for questioning. (Full story)
• Sheriff's officers in Sebastian County, Arkansas, detained a man who was taken into custody after a massive search by federal agents for a vehicle that they found Wednesday. A jail employee told CNN the FBI told them not to comment for "national security reasons." A spokeswoman at FBI headquarters in Washington said, "We can't comment on that."
• Authorities believe they have found the wheel of one of the planes that crashed into a World Trade Center tower four blocks away from ground zero.
The car was charred in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.
• Major League Baseball has postponed nearly 50 games. Four golf tournaments have been canceled. Some college football teams will play, some won't, and the NFL was to decide Thursday whether to cancel weekend play. (
• Network executives have started to comb through their fall fare, hoping to erase anything considered tasteless in light of Tuesday's tragedy, Variety reports.
• Diplomats and aid workers are evacuating Afghanistan, fearing reprisal from the United States.
• Mortuary personnel at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Thursday afternoon will start receiving bodies of victims killed in the terrorist attack on the Pentagon, officials tell CNN.
• St. Vincent Hospital and Medical Center, a trauma center in lower Manhattan, is trying to put together a Web site that lists names of patients injured in the terror attack at the World Trade Center. Officials there say they hope to have it up Thursday.
• Countries around the world are sharing the grief of the United States as it becomes clear that hundreds of their citizens were caught in the terrorist attacks in New York.
• Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, has promised full cooperation with the United States in its fight against terrorism.