A global investigation into the devastating attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon has netted 25 suspects, including two men charged Sunday as being material witnesses to the crime.
With some 4,000 federal agents pursuing roughly 40,000 leads, US authorities have arrested a second man in connection with the devastating attacks, a US Justice Department spokeswoman said Sunday.
"There were two people taken into custody on material witness warrants" by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said Mindy Tucker, spokeswoman for US Attorney General John Ashcroft.
The arrested men was among a group of 25 people detained and questioned in the last three days by the FBI in the United States in connection with the four-plane suicide attacks.
Tucker said she expected more arrest warrants to be issued soon. "We are at a point where there will be additional and more frequent warrants," she was quoted as saying in The Washington Post.
Top intelligence officials have told Newsweek they suspect some 30 to 50 teams of terrorists exist around the world, according to the magazine's latest issue.
"This is a very serious problem and these networks are world-wide, with thousands of individuals, they operate with complexity," said US Attorney General John Ashcroft, adding that the kind of cooperation that exists between terrorist groups "makes it possible that a variety of individuals are involved."
"We are working toward developing a keen understanding and awareness of any associates of these hijackers, and developing a better information about the threat that would exist within our own borders," he said.
Investigators have turned up several leads as they expand their probe far beyond the United States, searching for clues in Egypt and Lebanon, as well as across several European countries.
A senior official in Abu Dhabi said Sunday an Emirati citizen who may have joined the Afghan-based extremist group of prime suspect Osama bin Laden is one of those suspected to have taken part in the attacks.
Marwan al-Shehhi has been identified by the FBI as a pilot in the September 11 strikes. His mother, an Egyptian, is related to Mohammad Atta, an Egyptian also cited by the FBI as a suspect pilot in the hijackings.
Lebanon's security services in Beirut said Saturday that another of the 19 suspects the FBI believes was behind the attacks, Ziad Samir Jarrah, was a Lebanese national and had studied aeronautical engineering in Hamburg in northern Germany.
Germany is the focus of the European connection, where the federal prosecutor's office said it had tracked the movements of Jarrah, who was on a hijacked airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania.
Juergen Storbeck, head of the European Union's police coordination agency Europol, told the German newspaper Mitteldeutsche Zeitung that "our hottest trail" was in Hamburg, where three suspects, all now presumed dead, had lived in a first-floor, three-room apartment.
Belgian police were meanwhile holding two men they described as North Africans belonging to "a radical Islamic movement" after arresting them in Brussels on Thursday.
Asked about two of hijacking suspects who apparently were on an FBI watch list but managed to remain in the United States and even use frequent flyer miles to get on the doomed planes, Ashcroft acknowledged US laws limited action.
"Obviously there are things we'd like to be able to stop that we haven't been able to stop," he said, speaking from the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland.
"We'd like to able stop individuals who are on any watch list before they come into the country."
"We don't want those people in the country [but] this is a big country [and] we have substantial freedom of travel," he told Fox News Sunday.
Ashcroft insisted that US covert intelligence and investigative capabilities needed to be improved to deal with a multi-tentacled terrorist network -- WASHINGTON (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
