[SteveStromberg]

Published Friday, September 14, 2001


Hijackers believed to have had helpers in Florida
MANNY GARCIA, DANIEL de VISE AND ANDRES VIGLUCCI
aviglucci@herald.com

The five Florida men suspected as hijackers in Tuesday's terrorist attacks may have received help from local associates who provided cash and other support as they prepared for the deadly assaults, federal investigators believe.


A law enforcement source familiar with the investigation said agents believe at least 12 people in South Florida might have been involved in the plot. That includes the five hijacking suspects, all of whom died in Tuesday's crashes.

The FBI on Thursday released from questioning one man whom agents had flown from Vero Beach to Miami. Adnan Bukhari insisted he was not involved in the plot and passed an FBI-administered polygraph test showing ``no deception,'' two sources familiar with the investigation said.

But the investigators broadened the scope of the probe to anyone possibly connected to the suspects, questioning other local pilots and flight students of Middle Eastern origin who might have known the five men.

After three days of frenetic work, investigators have developed this picture: Most of the Florida suspects lived like college students and had little or no history of employment -- yet could somehow afford expensive flight training, some of it costing as much as $25,000, and paid for many expenses in cash.

``Somebody other than these guys was paying the bills,'' said a U.S. Justice Department source familiar with the probe.

The investigators also searched a Deerfield Beach motel where two central suspects in the probe, Mohamed Atta, 33, and Marwan Alshehhi, 23, may have lodged as recently as Monday night.

More details about Atta and Alshehhi emerged from German police, who said the two had been students at a university in Hamburg before coming to the United States sometime in the past year.

Police searched a Hamburg apartment they said had been rented until February by Atta, Alshehhi and an unidentified third man. In connection with their investigation, the Hamburg police also took into custody a Moroccan man who worked at the city's international airport. They declined to disclose his name. They also were looking for another man believed to have been involved in the attacks.

The German police described Atta and Alshehhi as citizens of the United Arab Emirates who had been enrolled in the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, where Atta founded an Islamic student group.

``It's highly likely that the clues needed to solve this mystery lie in student circles in Germany,'' the country's top prosecutor, Kay Nehm, said at a press conference.

Late Thursday, German federal investigators shut down the campus computer network, searched a room rented by the Islamic student group that Atta founded, and were combing through the group's computer.

In addition, FBI agents are studying records that tie at least two of the Florida suspects to Saudi Arabian Airlines and FlightSafety International, a flight-training school in Vero Beach. The link: One suspect said he was an engineer for the Saudi airline, and a second gave an airline post-office box as an address. Agents reportedly are interviewing three Saudi Arabian flight engineers studying for pilot licenses.


ON PAPER TRAIL

The investigators pored through financial records Thursday, searching for leads that might ferret out the suspected hijackers' funding source. They were building exhaustive financial profiles of the suspected hijackers and everyone possibly connected to them. Among the records being subpoenaed: cellular phone call lists, credit card invoices, apartment rental receipts, checking account records, vehicle ownership, mail drop rental contracts and searches of the mailboxes themselves.

``We're retracing where they lived and how they lived,'' said a federal source.

They were also racing to find additional people connected to the suspects who may have had flight training but were not on Tuesday's fatal flights.

Investigators say Atta and Alshehhi had the necessary training to at least steer the airplanes that slammed into the World Trade Center in New York on Tuesday. Both men had lived and trained at flight schools together up and down the state. Both had commercial pilot licenses.

Atta, of Coral Springs, and three other Florida suspects -- Waleed Al Shehri, 25, Abdulatif al-Omari, 31, and Wail M. Al Shehri, 28 -- were passengers on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the trade center.

Alshehhi, of Hollywood, was on United Airlines Flight 175, the second aircraft to strike the center.

A Vero Beach man, Amer Mohammed Kamfar, was being sought by the FBI for questioning.


MOTEL SEARCHED

A tip led agents to a Deerfield Beach motel, where Atta and Alshehhi may have stayed Monday. Federal agents and crime-scene specialists from the Broward Sheriff's Office converged on the Panther Motel, 715 South A1A, Thursday afternoon.

FBI agents walked the transient beach neighborhood, showing photos of four Arab men who, they said, could have been in the area on Monday.

Joe Carroll, 33, a neighbor, said two of the photos were of Atta and Alshehhi. Agents were asking hoteliers if any of the men -- or anyone with an Arabic name -- had stayed at their properties between August 23 and September 10.

The owners of the Panther, Diane and Richard Surma, would not answer reporters' questions.


Another tip took investigators to Daytona Beach, where three men who appeared to be Middle Eastern criticized the United States hours before the attack in a conversation with fellow patrons at a sports and nude bar, bragging, ``America is going to see blood, just wait until tomorrow.''

Pink Pony owner John Kap said he dismissed the Monday-night incident as beery bar banter -- until he heard the news about the jet attacks the following morning.

FBI officials wouldn't comment on the tip, but Kap said he turned over individual credit card receipts for each of the men, their driver license information, a Koran the men left behind and a business card one of the men slipped to a woman working at the bar.

Kap refused to name the men or indicate where they lived, but he said the FBI told him the information ``was one of the most substantial leads they had.''

Kap said the three men had stopped by the bar -- a sports bar and adjoining strip club -- about 10 p.m. They sat at the bar, racking up tabs of $40 to $80, and slipped back to watch