The plane crashed in a field 130km southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Germany's chief federal prosecutor said yesterday authorities here are searching for a man of Arab origin suspected of involvement in the devastating terrorist attacks.
Three of the men who participated in the attack are believed to have studied electronics at the Technical University in Hamburg, Kay Nehm told a news conference in the city of Karlsruhe.
"There is a suspicion that, since the beginning of this year, a group has been founded in Hamburg ... with the aim of carrying out serious crimes together with other Islamic fundamentalist groups abroad, to attack the United States in a spectacular way through the destruction of symbolic buildings," Nehm's office said in a statement.
Nehm said it was unknown as yet how many members the group had. However, Nehm said the search was unconnected to a detention announced earlier yesterday by police in Hamburg. That was not ordered by federal prosecutors, who took over the investigation early yesterday.
Three of the men believed to have studied in Hamburg were on board the first aircraft that hit New York's World Trade Center Tuesday, while the third was on board the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, he said.
Uniforms and a suicide note were found in a piece of luggage they left at the airport in Boston, Nehm said. He didn't give further details.
Earlier yesterday, police detained one man in the northern German city of Hamburg in connection with investigations into Tuesday's attacks, the chief of the state police said.
Gerhard Mueller said the man was detained pending an investigation, but refused to give details about his age and nationality.
Charlie Voss, a former employee at the Huffman Aviation flight training school in Venice, Florida where some of the terrorists apparently trained, said two students -- Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi -- had arrived from Germany in July last year.
At a news conference, Olaf Scholz, the official responsible for security in Hamburg's state government, said that people with those names -- both from the United Arab Emirates -- had been registered as Hamburg residents, and had been studying at the Technical University in the suburb of Harburg. Their courses included shipbuilding and electronics.
Alshhehi left Germany for the US on May 2 of this year, Scholz said, but he said it was unclear when Atta had left. Both had lived in Hamburg "for several years," he added.
Officials said it was too early to evaluate how promising the lead in Hamburg could be.
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