An FBI official was headed for the Azores Islands to interview two Iranians detained a week ago after they tried to travel to Canada with fake passports, authorities said. Mexican Defense Secretary Gen. Rafael Macedo said officials are searching the country for at least nine people who may have helped plan the attacks.
The Muslim cleric who was being sought, Moataz Al-Hallak, left the northeast on Monday, the day before the attacks, and traveled to Texas, according to authorities and his lawyer.
Al-Hallak's lawyer, Stanley Cohen, said FBI agents want to question his client about whether he told people about the attacks before they occurred.
``I asked Moataz about it, and he was shocked and just laughed. It's preposterous,'' Cohen said.
Al-Hallak appeared three times before a federal grand jury in New York in the case of the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa linked to bin Laden. He was never charged with wrongdoing.
Ashcroft said the FBI's 800-number hot line had received 2,055 calls. Its Web site had received more than 22,700 tips, he said.
While the hijackers were all ticketed passengers, some of the hijackers may have used aliases to get on the planes, law enforcement officials said.
A number of people that could be involved in the plot were detained overnight for having false identification, Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said.
One focus of the FBI is on flight schools in Florida and Minnesota that trained some of the men apparently involved in the hijackings. The owner of a Minnesota flight school said FBI agents had contacted him asking about specific people.
In Florida on Thursday, FBI agents were interviewing three Saudi Arabian flight engineers who are taking classes at Flightsafety International's school in Vero Beach, company spokesman Roger Ritchie said. He declined to name the engineers.
The school does not have simulators for Boeing 767 and 757 aircraft such as the ones involved in Tuesday's attacks, Ritchie said.
Thomas Quinn, a New York-based spokesman for Saudi Arabian Airlines, said many of the airline's pilots came to the United States for flight training.
The FBI questioned a Fort Smith, Arkansas, couple after telling police agencies across the state Wednesday that the woman was ``possibly related to the New York City terrorist attack,'' state police spokeswoman Kim Fontaine said. The husband was being held Thursday for federal immigration officials and the woman was taken away by agents and her whereabouts were not released, the Southwest Times Record newspaper at Fort Smith reported.
RSS