Investigators say they’ve tied hijackers to al-Qaida

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — U.S. investigators have established strong financial links between the al-Qaida terrorist network and the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, according to senior government officials who now consider the money trail the key to their investigation.

The ties to al-Qaida, the group headed by Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden, include transfers of thousands of dollars from hijacking leader Mohammed Atta to al-Qaida’s chief financial lieutenant in the Middle East within days of the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.

U.S. officials have also traced suspicious deposits to Atta from both Hamburg, Germany — where he previously was believed to be part of a student terrorist cell — and from several countries in the Middle East, sources said.

The operation was kicked off with a $100,000 transfer into a U.S. bank account last year that has been traced to the United Arab Emirates. According to one source familiar with the investigation, the transfer may have been arranged by the financial lieutenant, Mustafa Muhammad Ahmed. Scores of smaller transfers subsequently poured into the hijackers’ accounts, adding up to at least $500,000 in funding from overseas.

The information gathered by the FBI, the Treasury Department and other U.S. agencies has bolstered the belief among investigators that the hijacking operation was intricately planned and, compared to previous plots, well financed.

But the discoveries so far also are raising serious questions among banking regulators and lawmakers about the United States’ ability to keep track of suspicious financial transactions. Some hijackers, for example, paid cash for flight training lessons that can cost as much as $20,000 — a transaction that should have been reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Yet, one U.S. senator said there is little evidence that the FBI paid any attention to such transactions.

Money headed out of the country also provides clues in the government’s effort to track down accomplices to the Sept. 11 plot and to tie the hijackers to the sprawling al-Qaida network and its leader, bin Laden.

Some funds were shipped from one or more of the hijackers to Dubai as cash in a Federal Express package in the final days before the attacks, and the FBI has acquired videotape of the man who retrieved the package, sources said.

Another transaction that has aroused suspicion was $64,000 sent to Pakistan in 1999 by Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, who were detained on a train in Texas the day after the hijackings. The men, who had been on a flight from Newark that was grounded in St. Louis, had $5,000 in cash, box-cutter knives and hair dye when they were taken into custody.

"The money trail back to the institutions that were involved and the people that were financing the entire activity will be crucial to any criminal case in a U.S. courtroom, and crucial to any intelligence agency collecting information on the people who ran this and planned it," said John Martin, retired chief of the Justice Department’s internal security section. "And the money trail will eventually lead to the brains and leadership behind the operation."

Bin Laden, in denying responsibility for the attacks in a recent interview, bragged about his group’s ability to take advantage of loopholes in Western financial systems. He said global efforts to freeze assets connected to terrorism "will not make any difference for al-Qaida or other jihad groups."

"Al-Qaida comprises of such modern educated youths who are aware of the cracks inside the Western financial system as they are aware of the lines in their hands," bin Laden said. "These are the very flaws of the Western fiscal system, which are becoming a noose for it."

The funding for the attack began at least a year ago with a single deposit of more than $100,000 to a U.S. account controlled by Atta. Dennis Lormel, chief of the FBI’s financial crimes section, testified at a congressional hearing last week that the transfer has been traced back to an account in the United Arab Emirates.

In the following months, scores of cash infusions flowed into about a dozen accounts at Suntrust Bank in Florida and several other U.S. banks. These deposits were much smaller than the first, commonly amounting to $10,000 or less, according to officials familiar with the investigation.

Some of the U.S. accounts were used by multiple hijackers, who sometimes withdrew money from the same account in different cities on the same day. Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari, who both died on American Airlines Flight 11, are known to have shared at least one credit card — and were photographed by an ATM security camera in Portland, Maine, as Alomari withdrew cash on the night before the hijackings.

Sorting out the hijackers’ identities is an important obstacle facing U.S. investigators. The FBI is uncertain about the accurate identities of at least four hijackers, and similarities between common Arabic names and spellings has added to the confusion.

U.S. officials were investigating, for example, whether two of the hijackers, Ahmed Alghamdi and Mohand Alshehri, may have brought large amounts of cash into the country in person — even adhering to Customs rules that require travelers to declare at least $10,000 in cash. A man with Alghamdi’s name declared $14,000 on Aug. 10 in Newark, while a man listing his name as Alshehri declared $20,000 on Aug. 14 in Atlanta.

But their birth dates and other information didn’t line up with the hijackers of the same name. The evidence now indicates that both men were legitimate Saudi pilots with commonplace names who attended a flight school in Vero Beach, Fla., that had wrongly been linked with the hijackers early in the investigation.

Similar identity problems have proven vexing to bank executives, who have devoted hundreds of workers to sifting though at least five years of records as they try to match transactions to lists of names provided by the FBI and other authorities.

A key problem, sources say, is that many of the suspected terrorists or their collaborators were not permanent U.S. residents and lacked Social Security numbers when they opened bank accounts. They often used passports or visa numbers instead, making it impossible for banks to check credit histories or even determine if an individual spelled the English version of his Arabic name consistently in various financial transactions.

Wire transfers — a request from one bank to another that a customer’s money be moved electronically from one account to another — pose another problem for banking and law enforcement officials.

The FBI has told Congress that terrorists rely heavily on wire transfers, but detecting suspicious transfers can be nearly impossible, banking sources say. A large bank might typically handle from 10,000 to 125,000 wire transfers per day. About 70 percent are for amounts less than $500,000, though sums of $1 million to $4 million are not unusual.

So even the opening money transfer of $100,000 to Atta would not have seemed unusual, officials said. Investigators do not believe any bank made a major error in failing to follow guidelines for detecting or reporting suspicious activities. "Nothing they did would have tipped anyone off," said one source.