US banks discovered accounts believed to be connected to last week's hijackings and investigators made more arrests as they tried to trace the terrorist attacks back to the source.
In Chicago, the FBI arrested a man with the same name as someone with ties to a jailed associate of the suspected mastermind of the attacks, Osama bin Laden. The FBI said it was trying to determine if the man in custody was the same person.
In France, police detained seven people at dawn yesterday in the investigation. Both men and women were taken into custody, but their identities were not immediately released.
The FBI has told banking regulators that large and small banks around the country found accounts held by several of the 21 individuals wanted by the bureau in connection with the hijackings, a banking source said Thursday.
SunTrust Banks Inc in Florida was providing the FBI with information about the summer activity on nine checking accounts connected to people believed involved in the attacks, bank spokesman Barry Koling said.
Trying to guard against further terrorist activity, the FBI asked the nation's water companies to increase security at their facilities. US officials have said they were taking every precaution to ensure terrorists couldn't strike again as they did on Sept. 11, when hijackers crashed jetliners in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, killing thousands.
New threats
Adrienne Vaughan, spokeswoman for water company BHC Co in Bridgeport, Connecticut, said her company received a "terrorist threat advisory for infrastructures" from the American Water Works Association, an industry group.
Federal Aviation Administration officials issued a notice prohibiting until further notice flights in the immediate vicinity of any major professional or collegiate sporting event.
The FBI issued new warnings to local enforcement on Thursday, based on uncorroborated intelligence, to be on guard against possible attacks.
Authorities said the warning was not based on any evidence of a direct threat but rather on raw information that there could be more strikes.
Last week, the cities of Atlanta; Richmond, Virginia; and Boston received warnings from the FBI of possible strikes, but the warnings later were rescinded.
The Boston Globe and Boston Herald reported in yesterday's editions that Attorney General John Ashcroft told acting governor Jane Swift and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino on Thursday about potential terrorist strikes against Boston in coming days. But Ashcroft stressed that there were no specific threats, sources familiar with the conversations told the newspapers.
"People should not be alarmed," Menino told the Globe, when asked about the threat.
"At this point, people should go about their daily routines. The police will be observant."
In the Illinois case, the FBI said Nabil Al-Marabh, 34, was arrested Wednesday night at a convenience store in Burbank, Illinois, near Chicago, and was being questioned.
State records in Massachusetts show Al-Marabh had worked for Boston Cab Co, where an associate of bin Laden once worked. Al-Marabh has ties to a bin Laden associate, Raed Hijazi, a former Boston cab driver who is now jailed in Jordan on charges that he planned to blow up a hotel filled with Americans and Israelis on New Year's Day last year.
On his application for a license to drive a cab, Hijazi listed Al-Marabh as his emergency contact.
Jordanian officials say Hijazi has confessed that he planned terrorist attacks and received bomb-making training in Afghan guerrilla camps run by bin Laden.
Agents had been looking for Al-Marabh since failing to find him Monday at a Detroit residence where he had lived.
Al-Marabh also holds a commercial driver's license and is certified to transport hazardous materials, according to Michigan state records.
Links to hijackers
Al-Marabh is among almost 200 people the FBI wants to question, either because they are possible associates of the hijackers or because they are believed to have information about the hijackers or the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Officials would not specify why Al-Marabh was wanted.
In France, the seven arrested in the Val d'Oise region north of Paris and the Essonne region to the south were being questioned by counterintelligence agents.
The arrests were linked to Djamel Begal, a French-Algerian who was arrested in Dubai in July. Begal informed intelligence services there about alleged plans to attack the US Embassy in Paris and other US targets, police officials said.
Also, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, a French anti-terrorism judge, headed to the United Arab Emirates. Bruguiere and Jean-Francois Ricard opened an investigation into possible threats to American interests in France a day before the Sept. 11 attacks against the US.
In Pennsylvania, at the site of the Sept. 11 crash of United Airlines Flight 93, FBI Director Robert Mueller said Thursday that the agency is confident it has "several hijackers whose identities were those of the names on the manifest. We have several others who are still in question."
Doubts emerged in the Middle East over the identities of several of the 19 hijackers identified by the FBI last week. Saudi newspapers have reported that some of the men are alive; some were pilots.
A list of the 19 hijackers and two other people wanted in connection the investigation was sent to banking officials Wednesday by the FBI. It also suggested that one of those identified as a hijacker -- Khalid Al-Midhar -- may still be alive.
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