USS Cole Bomb Said Built in Nearby House

Oct. 19 -- As Senate and Pentagon investigators start probes into security arrangements for the USS Cole before last Thursday’s bombing, FBI director Louis Freeh is in Yemen ensuring all possible steps are being taken to find the perpetrators.

The FBI is focusing on two buildings in its investigation: one, about 20 miles from where the Cole was berthed, where bomb-making equipment was found on Tuesday; another small house is about 12 miles from the Cole. At least four men were involved, two of whom were thought to be the suicide bombers who killed 17 sailors on the Cole and injured 39, he said.

But the FBI still doesn’t know what organization, if any, planned the attack, Freeh said.

Freeh also repeated several times that the FBI’s presence in Yemen is temporary and that the U.S. force is a “junior partner” to the Yemeni police. Wednesday, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi said the FBI was going to set up a permanent presence in Yemen, causing angry rumors throughout the Arab world that Yemen’s president, Ali Abdulla Saleh, denied Wednesday night.

“The investigation is being run by the Yemeni police and security authorities. We are there as a partner ... but we are the junior partner,” Freeh said.

Freeh met with Saleh and with sailors on the Cole, and will leave Yemen later today.

Bomb Factory Found

Yemen’s president expressed confidence in a television interview on Wednesday that investigators had found the place where the bomb that was used in the attack was assembled.

“We were able to discover the car that transported the boat, and the launcher that lowered the boat, and we found the workshop that made the engine and the house that the people who carried out the crime were living in,” Saleh told Qatar’s satellite television station al-Jazeera.

“The boat came from [the port of] Hodeidah, the engine camefrom Aden,” Saleh said. “The attack had been planned for a longtime.”