M A I N   N E W S

Suspect ‘made’ trips to Syria
Laden’s money flowed through Swiss company: report

Hamburg (Germany), September 17
One of the suspected hijackers of a US airliner that crashed into New York’s World Trade Center (WTC) made several trips to Syria, the weekly Die Zeit reported in its latest edition.

Egypt-born Mohamed Atta (33) who also lived eight years in Germany, had visited Syria several times from 1994 to 1999, Die Zeit said in a communique released yesterday.

Atta is believed to be the hijacker who piloted one of the planes that crashed into the WTC last Tuesday.

Atta was registered as a student at Hamburg-Harbur Technical Uni-versity from 1992 until March of this year.

He visited Syria as part of work for his diploma, investigating urban development in the north Syrian town of Aleppo, Die Zeit said.

Die Zeit quoted a fellow student as saying that Atta was very skeptical about the “achievements of the western world” and that “the ever accelerating Americanisation of his homeland” (and) the “entry of modernisation into the Arab world did not please him.”

The other suspects have been identified as Ziad Samir Jarrah (26), a Lebanese national, and Marwan al-Shehhi (23) from the United Arab Emirates.

Al-Shehhi, who was in a second hijacked plane that crashed into the second tower of the WTC, told the landlord of an apartment he had rented briefly in Bonn in 1996 that they would never see each other again, Bildam Sonntag newspaper said.

“He embraced us and thanked us for our hospitality then he said: ‘We will certainly never see each other again,’” the landlord, identified only as Ute B., told the newspaper.

On Jarrah, the Hamburger Bendblatt reported that he had been a student in aeronautics construction in Hamburg since 1997.

But a few weeks ago, the young man, who was said to have been on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, was removed from the students, roll for not paying his tuition fees for the coming year.

BERN: As part of a broad probe into the attacks on the USA, the Swiss Federal Prosecutors Office said on Monday it was investigating whether any money linked to the terrorists flowed through the country’s banks.

The mass-circulation newspaper Blick reported that a financial services company based in the southern Swiss city of Lugano, Altaqwa Management Organisation AG, had links with the number one suspect in the attacks, Osama bin Laden.

It quoted Switzerland’s top policeman Urs von Daeniken as saying that the bank had been under suspicion for several years but the authorities had never found proof against it.

The authorities said there was evidence that one of the hijackers had spent time in Switzerland and used a credit card to purchase two knives. AFP, AP

50 terrorist teams still in USA: Newsweek

New York, September 17
Top intelligence fear that between 30 and 50 teams of terrorists are still on the loose in the USA, American news magazine Newsweek reported today.

The report said one of the hijackers on the plane that struck one of the World Trade Center building was seen in Norfolk in Virginia last winter, possibly surveying a navy base.

The Newsweek report comes as analysts say they do not rule out more terrorist attacks as law enforcement agencies have beefed up security around the country.

The report quoted intelligence sources as saying that the FBI was on the trail of two of the suspected hijackers two weeks before the attacks.

On August 21, the CIA passed along information to the immigration and naturalisation Service on a man who belonged on the “watch list” of suspects.

The man, Khalid al-Midhar, had been videotaped in Kuala Lumpur talking to one of the terrorists involved in the bombing of the USS Cole, in which 17 US servicemen died.

The man is now in jail in Yemen. PTI

US Justice Dept evacuated

Washington, September 17
The U.S. Justice Department was evacuated today after a bomb threat was received, with fire alarms sounding through the building as officers entered with bomb-sniffing dogs to begin a search.

Justice Department officials said the complex had been cleared because of a bomb threat but had no other details on how the threat had been made.

Security has been tight in the USA since last week’s attacks at the Pentagon near Washington and the World Trade Center in New York. Justice workers were told by department personnel to go away from the building, across Pennsylvania Avenue, and stand on the sidewalk by the nearby headquarters of the FBI. Reuters