The detailed surveillance photos and documents that prompted higher terror warnings came largely from a Pakistani computer engineer whose capture set Pakistani and US officials searching for those planning to harm America, and what they intend to do.
In the 72 hours leading up to Sunday's warning about new risks of terror attacks, senior officials pored over a wealth of detailed new information indicating al-Qaeda operatives were collecting chillingly precise information about five financial-services buildings in the US.
The trove of hundreds of photos, sketches and written documents came to light as a result of Pakistan's mid-July capture of Muslim extremist Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, also known as Abu Talha.
Officials are now following investigative leads, as they try to learn more about possible plots against the apparent targets: The Citigroup Center building and the New York Stock Exchange in New York, the IMF and World Bank buildings in Washington and Prudential Financial Inc's headquarters in Newark, New Jersey.
The information amassed by the plotters "was gathered in 2000 and 2001," and "it appears that some of it may have been updated as recently as January of this year," Frances Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said on PBS' NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.
But, she added, "you can't tell from the intelligence itself whether or not those individuals [who amassed it] are still here."
On Monday, a Pakistani intelligence official said Khan, a computer and communications expert, had sent messages to suspected al-Qaeda members using code words -- a practice typical of the international jihadist organization that bedeviled US efforts to unravel the Sept. 11, 2001, plot. But the Pakistani official refused to say if Khan was part of al-Qaeda.
Khan's information has been merged with other pieces of intelligence, including information gleaned after Pakistan's arrest last month of a senior al-Qaeda operative named Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.
E-mails that included plans for new attacks in Great Britain and the US were found on the computer of the captured Ghailani, Pakistan's information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, said Monday. But it was Khan and the information found after his arrest that was mostly behind the decision to raise the terror alert for the financial-services buildings in New York, Washington and northern New Jersey.
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