Atta faced questions about visa at MIA-INS,Police blew 4 chances to deport ringleader

Mohamed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the hijackers in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was almost denied entry to the United States earlier this year when an immigration inspector at Miami International Airport became suspicious that he wanted to take flight lessons while on a tourist visa.

The inspector ordered Atta out of the regular immigration line so a second immigration officer could question him at length, a federal official familiar with the incident said. After a 57-minute delay, the second inspector cleared Atta into the country as a tourist, the official said.

Atta's brief detention at the airport on Jan. 10, after arriving on a flight from Madrid, Spain, is the fourth instance that has come to light since the attacks that U.S. authorities missed a chance to stop the 33-year-old Egyptian pilot before the hijackings.

On Dec. 27, a Federal Aviation Administration official threatened to investigate Atta and another hijacking suspect, Marwan al-Shehhi, after they abandoned their broken-down small private plane on a taxiway at Miami International the day after Christmas.

Also on Jan. 10, the Immigration and Naturalization Service inspectors who interviewed Atta failed to notice that he had overstayed his visa by 32 days during a prior trip to the United States.

And in May, police failed to arrest Atta on a warrant issued after he missed a May 28 court hearing on a ticket in Tamarac for driving without a valid license.

Rodney Germain, an INS spokesman in Miami, declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

The U.S. official familiar with the investigation said the INS officer who inspected Atta's papers at 5:03 p.m. Jan. 10 became concerned when Atta said he was in the United States for flight training.

The inspector pulled Atta out of the line because he had a tourist visa, not the M vocational training visa commonly issued to foreign students seeking flight training, the official said.

Atta told the inspector that he had applied for an M and was awaiting a change in status, the official said.

The INS officer told Atta to report to a second INS official for secondary inspection, ostensibly a more thorough interview in which an arriving passenger is grilled extensively on his or her intentions while in the United States.

According to the U.S. official, the second inspector ultimately cleared Atta into the country.

Had the second inspector deemed Atta inadmissible, the officer could have either ordered Atta transferred to the Krome Service Processing Center or deported him on the next plane back to Europe. Neither MIA inspector apparently noticed that Atta had overstayed his visa on his previous trip.

When Atta first arrived from Prague, Czech Republic, on June 3, 2000, an INS inspector at Newark International Airport gave him until Dec. 2, 2000, to stay in the country. But it was Jan. 4 when Atta left Miami for Madrid.

Patrick Pizarro, a former INS officer familiar with MIA inspections, said the reason immigration inspectors missed Atta's overstay is that they are under pressure to clear tourists as quickly as possible.

``Supervisors want you not to delay those people unless their papers are not in order or they have no papers,'' Pizarro said.

``You don't have all the information about every arriving passenger in one database,'' Pizarro said. ``It's all scattered in various databases and it's time-consuming to find the information you need.''

Atta's arrival record for Jan. 10, the day he was briefly detained at the Miami airport, contains another intriguing feature: He was admitted to the United States twice on the same day.

It's unclear on which entry Atta was delayed at the immigration line because the record does not show a time of arrival.

On one entry record that day, Atta was given until July 9 to stay in the United States, on the other until Sept. 8.

The immigration record does not explain why Atta was cleared into the country twice on the same day. But a small notation on the record says the second entry ``may be another person entering with identical passport.''

A U.S. official familiar with the document said it was also possible that Atta left the country on a private plane and returned the same day.

Establishing whether another person used Atta's passport is important because of the contention by U.S. intelligence officials that Atta was spotted in Prague in April 2001 meeting with an Iraqi agent.

INS records do not show Atta leaving the country at all between Jan. 10 and July 7, when he again left Miami for Madrid.

If Atta left the country and returned before July 7, he did so without leaving a trace.

Atta's last entry into the United States was July 19, when an INS inspector at Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta gave him until Nov. 12 to stay.

Iraq's chemists bought anthrax from America

(Filed: 18/10/2001)

Saddam's bio-warfare scientists were trained in Britain and sent off for bacteria by mail order, reports Roger Highfield

THE intelligence community has focused on Iraq as a possible source of the anthrax used in the bio-terrorist attacks in America.

If Iraq is the culprit, it is likely that Saddam Hussein would have used one of 21 strains of the anthrax bacterium which his scientists bought by mail order from America in the 1980s.

In a further irony, most of the leading scientists in the Iraqi bio-warfare programme, including its project chief, Rihab Rashida Taha, were trained in Britain.

In 1995, three years before the United Nations special commission weapons inspectors were forced to pull out of the country, Iraq admitted that it had produced 2,000 gallons of anthrax.

The UN destroyed most of those supplies, but officials believe that Baghdad hid four times as much as was discovered.

Iraq still has the best biological expertise in the region and experts agree that, since the UN inspectors left, Saddam has been back in the bio-warfare business.

Britain has played an unwitting role in arming Iraq, although a spokesman for the successor to Unscom - the UN monitoring, verification and inspection commission - said: "There is not an awful lot of difference between making vaccines and making bio-weapons - it is a bit unfair to mark those who supplied Iraq as guilty."

British companies exported to Iraq large quantities of the growth media in which biological weapons are cultivated and its leading scientists were trained here.

The covert biological weapons research programme was directed by Gen Amer Saadi, who obtained a masters degree in chemistry at Oxford, and Rihab Taha, who studied microbiology at the University of East Anglia, said Richard Spertzel, the UN's former chief biological inspector.

Overall supervision was conducted by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, the director of Iraq's Military-Industrial Corp, and Ahmed Murthada, a British-trained engineer.

The country's biological weapons programme is believed to have started in 1974 at Salman Pak in the al-Hazan Ibn al-Hathem Institute, where Dr Taha arrived in 1980.

Five years later, Salman Pak was taken over by the Technical Research Centre and, in 1987, Dr Taha moved her team into the new al-Hakem facility at Salman Pak, where construction of facilities for production of anthrax began, among other agents.

At the time of the Gulf war, Iraq later acknowledged the large-scale production of anthrax spores and to have filled 50 bombs and five missile warheads with anthrax.

However, even in its "full, final and complete declaration" regarding its BW programme, submitted in September 1997, Baghdad continued to present the UN weapons inspectors with a false picture.

Iraq approached Porton Down in Britain for the Ames strain of the anthrax bacterium, said Dr Spertzel. "That [request] was fortunately denied," he said.

Iraq obtained much of its anthrax supply from the American Type Culture Collection. Between 1985 and 1989, it obtained at least 21 strains of anthrax from ATCC and about 15 other class III pathogens, the bacteria that pose an extreme risk to human health.

One strain had a British military pedigree and three of the other strains were listed as coming from the American military's biological warfare programme.

This came as a shock, said Dr Spertzel, although he added that at that time the ATCC had a policy to supply laboratories with credible reputations. The anthrax strains were ordered by the University of Baghdad and then diverted to the bio-warfare effort.

Mohamed Atta, the September 11 hijacker, reportedly had encounters with an Iraqi operative in Prague as recently as April and there have been reports of meetings between Iraqi agents and associates of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

However, Dr Spertzel added that what took place in these encounters, and whether bio-warfare was discussed, was a matter of speculation.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.