New Arrests Made in Terrorist Manhunt
W A S H I N G T O N, Sept. 21, 2001 -- A worldwide manhunt for suspected terrorists intensified today amid fears that a second wave of attacks may be planned.
MORE INVESTIGATIVE NEWS: • Raids in Paris, London, Burlington, Ky.
• Warnings Issued to U.S. Industries• Terrorist Manhunt Continues• Investigation's Midwest Focus• Suspected Terrorist Stock Trading Probed
After raiding 14 apartments, detaining a dozen people, and pursuing nearly a thousand leads, German authorities today issued arrest warrants for two men who lived and studied in the northern port of Hamburg.
Police charged 26-year-old Said Bahaji, a German of Moroccan origin and 29-year-old Ramzi Binalshibh of Yemen with "forming a terrorist organization and with at least 5,000 counts of murder."
"The two were part of preparation for the attack since at least 1999," said Kay Nehm, Germany's federal prosecutor. "We have not established a link with bin Laden but we are headed that way."
Bahaji and Binalshibh lived in a modest Hamburg apartment with three of the alleged highjackers, including suspected ring leader Mohamed Atta, who is believed to have perished after hijacking American Airlines Flight 11 and flying it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Neighbors said up to 20 Arab men would hold meetings in the apartment three times a week.
Hamburg's Interior Minister, Olaf Scholz, said authorities had determined the identities of the men, though some may have already left Germany.
"It's up to the police to find them but I can't tell you anymore because we want a successful investigation," Scholz said.
The alleged hijackers, all of whom are presumed dead, and most of those being sought in connection with last week's four hijacking attacks in the United States, attended two universities in Hamburg.
They studied urban planning and aircraft design. Atta's student adviser told ABCNEWS that he was bright, extremely religious, and angry at the modern world.
"He'd point out the way high-rises were built and say they were against the Muslim way of life," said Chilla Wendt a professor of architecture at Hamburg Technical Institute. Another professor, Dittmar Machule said Atta became radicalized after visiting the Middle East a couple of years ago. "There was a changing in his brain, in his thinking, a changing that offers us a very, very different person."
Hamburg is home to more than 80,000 Muslims, nearly 300 identified by police as Arab extremists. Germany is considered a safe haven because it has some of the strictest privacy laws in Europe. "They have correctly assumed we are naive," said professor Udo Steinback at Germany's Institute for Middle East Studies.
Now with nearly every police officer and a contingent of FBI agents looking for more suspects, that may well change.
— Bill Redeker, Hamburg
"We do expect more attacks," a senior Bush administration official said Thursday. "We're at the point where anything is possible, but nothing can be predicted."
"We obviously have continuing concerns about the people responsible for Tuesday's attacks and information that does suggest they might have planned further attacks," added a senior intelligence official. "But we don't have any intelligence that gives us specific dates or methods for those attacks."
FBI Manhunt Continues
The FBI is continuing to pursue more than 200 people suspected of having ties to the hijackers, including as many as 30 who are believed to have had flight training.
ABCNEWS has learned that some of the individuals thought to have been trained as pilots had booked reservations on airline flights scheduled to take place in the days after last week's attacks — including flights out of Boston and San Antonio this coming weekend. They are from a variety of locations within the United States and all of them are believed to still be in the country.
"This long list of people who had some kind of contact with the suicide hijackers … They may be part of a network," says ABCNEWS security consultant Vince Cannistraro. "That is a concern that is driving law enforcement in the investigation."
The FBI has obtained cell phone records and hundreds of e-mail messages exchanged by many of the 19 hijackers and their associates in the days and weeks leading up to the attacks.
"We will not sleep until they are brought to justice," FBI Director Bob Mueller vowed today as he and Ashcroft toured the damage in New York.
"We will bring them to justice or if that's impossible, we will take justice to them," the attorney general added, paraphrasing a line from the president's address to a joint session of Congress Thursday night.
Investigation's Midwest Focus
More than 115 people are now in federal custody in connection with the investigation, including several individuals who have been placed under arrest.
Most recently, a man identified as Nabil Al-Marabh was arrested Wednesday night at a liquor store where he worked the late shift in Burbank, Ill., just outside Chicago.
Sources tell ABCNEWS investigators believe Al-Marabh, 34, has ties to at least two of the suspected hijackers and the U.S. Customs Service has linked money transfers from Al-Marabh to Raed Hijazi, a suspect in a failed plot to kill American tourists in Jordan during the 2000 millennium celebration.
Al-Marabh, who had a commercial driver's license that allowed him to transport hazardous materials, has lived all over the United States for the last 11 years, including in Tampa, Boston and Michigan.
When agents searched Al-Marabh's apartment in Detroit earlier this week, they found notes relating to an airport in Jordan, a diagram of an airport and fake identification badges.
Three Arab men were taken into custody at that residence and have been formally charged with the possession of false identification documents.
Meanwhile, a man who has been held by Canadian authorities since shortly after the attacks was charged today in Chicago with two counts of intent to use a false passport. The man, who used the name Najib Mohammed, was on a flight from Germany to Chicago on Sept. 11 when it was diverted to Toronto after U.S. airports were closed.
Canadian authorities became suspicious because they said Mohammed has three different passports. In adddition, his luggage had arrived in Chicago on an earlier flight, and because it was unclaimed, customs agents opened it and found Lufthansa Airlines crew uniforms and "suspicious" writing on a paper sewn into a pants pocket.
However, Canadian officials said they had found nothing linking Mohammed to the suspected hijackers. The FBI is seeking his extradition to the United States.
In New York, an investigation by a grand jury in White Plains has led to the detention of some 75 people for questioning, with five people under arrest as material witnesses. Among those arrested is an alleged associate of bin Laden, who was taken into custody Aug. 17 after workers at a Minnesota flight school raised suspicions about him.
There is now some confusion among law enforcement officials about the real identities of the 19 men pegged by investigators as the terrorists who hijacked the four planes on Sept. 11. Mueller acknowledged Thursday that some of the hijackers may have been traveling under aliases and stolen names, and that the identities of "several" of them are "still in question."
A Saudi Arabian official told ABCNEWS two of the men named as hijackers by the FBI have been confirmed to be alive and well. And newspapers in the Middle East also reported three additional men named as hijackers are alive.
Suspected Terrorist Stock Trading Probed
New evidence has emerged of a possible effort by the terrorists who perpetrated last week's attacks to profit financially from the tragedy.
The Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and a Chicago exchange have launched a major investigation into some suspicious and highly sophisticated stock trading just prior to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The week before the attack, virtually unheard of numbers of "puts" — basically bets made by an investor that a stock's price will fall by a certain date — were sold for United Airlines and American Airlines, which operated the four hijacked planes; Morgan Stanley, the investment bank which occupied more than 20 floors in the now-destroyed twin towers; and a number of other companies that were adversely affected by the tragedy and whose stocks plunged as a result.
"This could very well be insider trading at the most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your entire life," Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg Business News said Thursday on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America.
If the money trail does in fact lead to terrorist groups, they will have made a fortune.
"Millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars on a bet that all told could be $600,000 turned into $10 million, $20 million," Ratigan said.
A senior intelligence official told ABCNEWS Thursday: "We still don't have any direct confirmation that [bin Laden] was involved in selling stocks short — yet."
The Treasury Department's Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center has launched an effort to track financial transactions of members of bin Laden's terrorist network. The FBI Thursday asked banks to check their records and report any transactions with any of the named terrorist suspects.
Canadian authorities became suspicious because they said Mohammed has three different passports. In adddition, his luggage had arrived in Chicago on an earlier flight, and because it was unclaimed, customs agents opened it and found Lufthansa Airlines crew uniforms and "suspicious" writing on a paper sewn into a pants pocket.
However, Canadian officials said they had found nothing linking Mohammed to the suspected hijackers. The FBI is seeking his extradition to the United States.
In New York, an investigation by a grand jury in White Plains has led to the detention of some 75 people for questioning, with five people under arrest as material witnesses. Among those arrested is an alleged associate of bin Laden, who was taken into custody Aug. 17 after workers at a Minnesota flight school raised suspicions about him.
There is now some confusion among law enforcement officials about the real identities of the 19 men pegged by investigators as the terrorists who hijacked the four planes on Sept. 11. Mueller acknowledged Thursday that some of the hijackers may have been traveling under aliases and stolen names, and that the identities of "several" of them are "still in question."
A Saudi Arabian official told ABCNEWS two of the men named as hijackers by the FBI have been confirmed to be alive and well. And newspapers in the Middle East also reported three additional men named as hijackers are alive.
Suspected Terrorist Stock Trading Probed
New evidence has emerged of a possible effort by the terrorists who perpetrated last week's attacks to profit financially from the tragedy.
The Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and a Chicago exchange have launched a major investigation into some suspicious and highly sophisticated stock trading just prior to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The week before the attack, virtually unheard of numbers of "puts" — basically bets made by an investor that a stock's price will fall by a certain date — were sold for United Airlines and American Airlines, which operated the four hijacked planes; Morgan Stanley, the investment bank which occupied more than 20 floors in the now-destroyed twin towers; and a number of other companies that were adversely affected by the tragedy and whose stocks plunged as a result.
"This could very well be insider trading at the most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your entire life," Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg Business News said Thursday on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America.
If the money trail does in fact lead to terrorist groups, they will have made a fortune.
"Millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars on a bet that all told could be $600,000 turned into $10 million, $20 million," Ratigan said.
A senior intelligence official told ABCNEWS Thursday: "We still don't have any direct confirmation that [bin Laden] was involved in selling stocks short — yet."
The Treasury Department's Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center has launched an effort to track financial transactions of members of bin Laden's terrorist network. The FBI Thursday asked banks to check their records and report any transactions with any of the named terrorist suspects.