75 detained for questioning; at least four material witnesses arrested
( 2001-09-19 13:50 ) (7 )

US Attorney General John Ashcroft vowed to wage a "concerted national assault" on terrorists as he expanded the investigation of last week's twin attacks to marshal the resources of every US attorney in the country.

Aided by a federal grand jury in New York, the investigation had detained 75 people for questioning and had four people under arrest as material witnesses, law enforcement officials said on Tuesday.

The government also announced a new policy doubling to 48 hours the amount of time immigrants can be held in detention on immigration status. Many of those questioned in Tuesday's attack were being detained on immigration violations.

The attorney general vowed to use "every legal means at our disposal to prevent further terrorist activity by taking people into custody who have violated the law and who may pose a threat to America."

Ashcroft said publicly for the first time that authorities are probing whether more flights beyond the four that crashed last Tuesday were targeted for hijackings, but noted the possibility had not yet been corroborated.

The restructuring of the investigation include the creation of anti-terrorism task forces by every US attorney office in the country.

"These task forces will be a part of a national network that will coordinate the dissemination of information and the development of a strategy to disrupt, dismantle and punish terrorist organizations throughout the country," he said.

The government searched for more than 190 people who investigators believe may have information about the attack or who may have assisted the hijackers.

The effort was being aided by a grand jury in White Plains, New York, and officials said other grand juries would likely be used around the country to issue subpoenas and gather evidence.

Among the four material witnesses under arrest was Albader Alhazmi, 34, a Saudi national and Saudi-trained doctor who was doing a medical residency in radiology at University of Texas Health Science Center, a law enforcement official said. He was being held in New York.

Alhazmi did not show up for his radiologist job on September 11. He had been working at a military hospital located on Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio during the week before the attacks, said an official at the medical center.

Meanwhile, evidence emerged on Tuesday that the FBI had tracked the activities of one Arab man who was seeking jetliner training from Minnesota to Oklahoma in the weeks before Tuesday's attacks.

The FBI came by the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, about two weeks before the terrorist attacks, inquiring about Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now in custody in New York in the investigation.

The FBI had a picture of Moussaoui and asked if people at the school could identify him and they also asked about his mannerisms and what he did at the school, said admissions director Brenda Keene.

Moussaoui was detained August 17 in Minnesota on immigration issues after he aroused suspicions by seeking to buy time on a flight simulator for jetliners at a Minnesota flight school, law enforcement officials said. Oklahoma school officials described Moussaoui as an impatient student who was not good at flying. But they said nothing about him led them to think he was connected to terrorists.

An unconfirmed link to Iraq emerged Tuesday in the intelligence community.

A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States has received information from a foreign intelligence service that Mohamed Atta, a hijacker aboard one of the planes that slammed into the World Trade Center, met earlier this year in Europe with an Iraqi intelligence agent.

The raw intelligence came in since the attacks last Tuesday and has not yet been corroborated by US authorities, the official said.

The FBI continued to explore evidence, some which has emerged from Saudi Arabian authorities, that some of the hijackers may have stole the identities of other Arabs and used the names to carry out their attacks, officials said.

Authorities also detained a man in San Diego, California, who was linked through financial transactions to two of the 19 hijackers, officials said. Tarek Mohamed Fayad, 33, was taken into federal custody on Monday for questioning about a possible link to one of the hijackers, law enforcement officials said.