Freed from a judge's gag order, FBI officials and Las Vegas police confirmed they learned in the autumn of 2002 about two videotapes suggesting terrorists had cased the city's casinos -- but decided it wasn't necessary to alert the public.
The officials on Tuesday also strongly disputed that they didn't take the evidence seriously, as suggested in Justice Department documents and by a federal prosecutor in Detroit who alerted them to the evidence and spoke publicly of his concerns this week.
The tapes were shown to casinos in the autumn of 2002, officials said, but they added there were differing recollections about whether some local officials declined a later opportunity to learn more about the surveillance from an FBI agent from Detroit who had worked on the case.
"We took the tapes seriously," Special Agent David Nanz in Las Vegas said. "When we get a tape like that ... further investigation is required to determine its relevance. And that's what we did."
Nanz said, however, that his office agreed with colleagues in Detroit that both tapes amounted to terrorist surveillance. "We don't dispute those were surveillance tapes," he said.
In documents and interviews reported on by AP on Monday, authorities in Detroit alleged as early as September 2002 that Las Vegas authorities didn't want to issue a public warning because of concerns it might hurt tourism or affect the casinos' legal liability.
Las Vegas authorities denied on Tuesday that those factors affected their decision.
Nanz said one of the two tapes, the Spanish al-Qaeda footage, was still classified at the time and Las Vegas authorities weren't immediately told that a witness named Youseff Hmimssa would corroborate the threat on the Detroit tape by saying members of a terror cell in Detroit had vowed to destroy the tourist city.
"The FBI in Las Vegas was not made aware in advance that Hmimssa's testimony would implicate security issues with Las Vegas,'' he said.
After several Las Vegas authorities said on Monday that they never knew about the tapes, Clark County Undersheriff Douglas Gillespie confirmed two of his officers had indeed seen the footage and that authorities also offered the casinos to see the footage.
"At no time did the information gleaned from these videos change the threat level in Las Vegas," Gillespie said, adding that he believed his department handled the information correctly.
Nanz and Gillespie spoke on Tuesday night after the Justice Department sought permission from a judge in Detroit to talk about some evidence that emerged in the AP story even though there is a gag order in the Detroit case.
Both men sought to resolve disputes among Las Vegas authorities, such as Mayor Oscar Goodman, who claimed they never knew about the tape. Their explanations, however, still conflicted with some documents written at the time.
One of the tapes, found in Spain in 2002, shows al-Qaeda's European operatives surveying Las Vegas casinos in 1997, engaging in casual conversation that included an apparent reference to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US.
The other tape found in a Detroit terror cell's apartment had eerily similar footage of the MGM Grand, the Excalibur and New York, New York casinos -- three hotels within a short distance of each other on the Las Vegas strip with a combined total of 11,000 rooms.
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