Associated Press
WASHINGTON — A Saudi man who apparently holds a student pilot’s license was arrested in Missouri on a bank fraud charge, and a fellow Saudi who once took flight lessons in Alabama pleaded innocent to lying on his visa application as the nationwide terror investigation rolled ahead Monday.
The FBI has not tied Adel F. Badri, arrested in Missouri, to the Sept. 11 attacks against New York and Washington. An attorney for the other man, Khalid al-Draibi, who appeared in a federal court in Virginia, said al-Draibi has passed a lie-detector test about the attacks but is still under investigation.
Missouri police arrested Badri and charged him with bank fraud for cashing allegedly forged checks worth $10,000, according to an FBI affidavit released by the Justice Department.
The checks were written on an account at Chevy Case Bank in Maryland that had been closed. According to the FBI, the closed account’s holder was Fatmah Ibrahim, a woman who Badri said lives in Virginia and works for a "specific organization in Washington, D.C." Badri denied writing the check for himself.
Authorities tracked down the unidentified organization and found no record of the woman, and a forgery expert said Badri wrote the checks, the FBI said.
Federal Aviation Administration records show a person named Adel F. Badri was certified as a student pilot in the FAA’s eastern region covering the District of Columbia and Maryland, Virginia and other Atlantic seaboard states.
Some of 19 alleged hijackers suspected of crashing four planes on Sept. 11 and killing more than 5,000 people had U.S. pilots’ licenses or took flight lessons in the United States.
The FBI affidavit does not specify whether Badri had links to the attacks. The Justice Department’s practice is to release court records about cases that come up in the terror investigation. A hearing is scheduled for today in federal court in Kansas City.
Al-Draibi, 32, pleaded innocent in an Alexandria, Va., federal court, to providing false statements on a visa application and lying to police about being a U.S. citizen.
He was pulled over by Virginia police the night of Sept. 11 while driving on a flat tire. A search of his car found multiple drivers’ licenses from eight states and a flight manual for small aircraft.
Al-Draibi passed an FBI polygraph test, in which he denied any connection, but the FBI is still interested in talking with him about the attacks, said his lawyer, Drewry Hutcheson Jr.
Authorities said al-Draibi took flight lessons at a field near Birmingham, Ala., where he worked as a taxi driver in 1998 and 1999. He paid cash for his lessons, workers at the flight school said.
Investigators also are looking at whether terrorists have laundered money through exchange bureaus, possibly including U.S. companies.
German Interior Minister Otto Schily, in Washington to meet with Bush administration officials, said foreign exchange companies that operate globally could have been used by terrorists. He would not name specific companies but urged money exchange firms to cooperate.
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