WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Islamic groups like Hizbollah and Egypt's Islamic Jihad could be planning to attack the United States and may be more able to do so than the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman said on Monday.
"Our enemy is not al Qaeda alone," Sen. Bob Graham said on NBC's "Today" show, referring to the movement believed behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that killed more than 3,000 people.
"There are several international terrorist groups which have abilities, in some cases greater abilities than al Qaeda and a similar desire to attack the United States."
"Groups like Hizbollah, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad" were two organizations with the capability and desire to attack the United States, said the Florida Democrat.
Neither group has been linked directly to activities on U.S. soil, and such an attack would represent a major change in their tactics.
Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday said a new attack on the United States was "almost certain" as U.S. intelligence officials picked up signals that a fresh al Qaeda strike could be in the works.
The FBI also warned of a possible plot by al Qaeda network to detonate bombs in U.S. apartment buildings.
Graham said in a separate CNN interview that he was "almost certain" another attack would take place within three to five years.
He said he was especially concerned about security at the nation's seaports and mentioned a recent instance of 25 "extremists" who had entered the United States.
"(They) jumped on ships outside the United States, hid in the container cargoes until they got to the United States and then disembarked and they've been lost in the American population," he said.
Defense Department spokeswoman Victoria Clarke stressed that despite major successes against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, where a U.S.-led military campaign has destroyed the group's main camps, it and other groups remained a threat.
"We have always said this is about more than one person, one network and certainly is about more than Afghanistan," Clarke told a news briefing.
Lebanon's Hizbollah, largely seen as a resistance group to Israeli occupation, has traditionally carried out suicide and other attacks against targets in Israel and Lebanon. The Shi'ite Muslim group is backed by Iran.
Egypt's al-Jihad, which has links with al-Qaeda, is the country's second-largest Islamic militant group. The United States has blamed the group for bombing the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad in 1995 and planning to attack the U.S. embassy in Albania in 1998.
A 1999 report for the CIA that envisioned bin Laden's network might attack the United States by crash-landing an aircraft into the Pentagon, the CIA or the White House also named Lebanon's Hizbollah as a possible group that could carry out an attack on the United States.