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FBI starting to unravel mystery behind attacks

A Saudi man who apparently holds a student pilot's license was arrested in Missouri on a bank fraud charge, and a fellow Saudi who once took flight lessons in Alabama pleaded innocent to lying on his visa application as the nationwide terror investigation rolled ahead.

The FBI has not tied Adel F. Badri, arrested Monday in Missouri, to the Sept. 11 attacks against New York and Washington. An attorney for the other man, Khalid al-Draibi, who appeared in a federal court in Virginia, said al-Draibi has passed a lie-detector test about the attacks but is still under investigation.

Investigators also are looking at whether terrorists have laundered money through exchange bureaus, possibly including US companies.

German Interior Minister Otto Schily, in Washington to meet with Bush administration officials, said foreign exchange companies that operate globally could have been used by terrorists. He would not name specific companies but urged money exchange firms to cooperate.

Separately, it was disclosed that a Jersey City man detained following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has been charged with lying to an FBI agent about checks he wrote and deposited into his bank account.

Mohammad Pervez lived with two other detainees, Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan. Investigators have taken particular interest in those two men since they were detained in Fort Worth, Texas, the day after the attacks, carrying hair dye, about US$5,000 in cash and box-cutting knives.

Pervez was accused of lying when he said he didn't know about certain checks and money orders that moved in and out of his bank account, according to an Oct. 16 complaint filed in the US District Court in New York City by the FBI.

Missouri police arrested Badri and charged him with bank fraud for cashing allegedly forged checks worth US$10,000, according to an FBI affidavit released by the Justice Department.

The checks were written on an account at Chevy Chase Bank in Maryland that had been closed. According to the FBI, the closed account's holder was Fatmah Ibrahim, a woman who Badri said lives in Virginia and works for a "specific organization in Washington, D.C." Badri denied writing the check for himself.

Authorities tracked down the unidentified organization and found no record of the woman, and a forgery expert said Badri wrote the checks, the FBI said.

Federal Aviation Administration records show a person named Adel F. Badri was certified as a student pilot in the FAA's eastern region covering the District of Columbia and Maryland, Virginia and other Atlantic seaboard states.

Some of the 19 alleged hijackers suspected of crashing four planes on Sept. 11 and killing more than 5,000 people had US pilots' licenses or took flight lessons in the US.

The FBI affidavit does not specify whether Badri had links to the attacks. The Justice Department's practice is to release court records about cases that come up in the terror investigation. A hearing was to be held yesterday in a federal court in Kansas City.

Al-Draibi, 32, pleaded innocent in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal court, to providing false statements on a visa application and lying to police about being a US citizen.

He was pulled over by Virginia police the night of Sept. 11 while driving on a flat tire. A search of his car found multiple drivers' licenses from eight states and a flight manual for small aircraft.
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