A group of FBI counterterrorism analysts warned this week of possible terrorist attacks in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago on or around Sept. 11, but officials cautioned on Thursday that they were skeptical about the seriousness of the threat.
The warning grew out of intelligence developed from an overseas source indicating that terrorists might seek to steal fuel tanker trucks in order to inflict "mass casualties" by staging an anniversary attack, officials said.
The information led FBI joint terrorism task forces in Los Angeles and Newark, New Jersey, to alert other government and law enforcement officials privately this week about the threat, law enforcement officials said.
Several officials in Washington who were briefed on the threat said it was described as credible and specific enough to warrant attention.
However, other law enforcement officials in Washington and New York said that while they were aware of the warnings and were concerned about the Sept. 11 anniversary, they remained somewhat skeptical about the latest threat.
The FBI was planning to send out another confidential law enforcement bulletin on Thursday to qualify the earlier one and stress that the threat of a possible tanker attack had not been verified.
"The information is uncorroborated, and the source is of questionable reliability," Department of Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said. "This information continues to be evaluated by the intelligence community."
There were no immediate plans to raise the national threat level, although urban transit systems remain on higher alert after last month's subway attacks in London.
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