Hijack squad worked as one: investigators

By STAFF REPORTERS and AGENCIES

The terrorists who brought death to New York and Washington worked as a single group, rather than four distinct cells, with clear leaders and foot soldiers and financed with a grant of $US500,000 ($1.2 million), latest reports show.

A Washington Post investigation said the 19 men who carried out the September 11 suicide attacks were linked over a long period, sharing apartments, taking flying lessons together or sharing credit cards.

Early FBI investigations worked on the assumption that the terrorists were made up of four compartmentalised cells, supported by large amounts of money from outside the US, and most were trained pilots.

But from its study of public records and interviews with investigators, the paper claims "it now seems clear that only a single hijacker aboard each of the four commandeered aircraft knew how to fly a plane".

The leadership group, commanded, it appears, by Mohamed Atta, were educated, worldly and almost all had studied at the Technical University of Hamburg, Germany. The rest, says the paper, were a cadre of 13 Saudi Arabian men, far less educated and many from the country's poorest areas.

An unnamed senior Government official told the Post: "There are two groups on each plane. You've got the brains, who are the pilots and the leaders, and then you have the muscle coming in later on. They were the ones who held the passengers at bay."

The paper, whose analysis was immediately picked up by wire agencies, said the web stretched back to 1999, when the first pilot arrived in the US.

Nearly three weeks into the investigation, authorities are slowly piecing together an international collection of suspects believed to hold keys to the conspiracy. What is emerging from the global investigation spanning seven European countries, the Middle East and the US is a looser collection of interlinked cells in Europe and a tighter, integrated structure in the US.

In the US, investigators have begun focusing on Nabil Al-Marabh, a Detroit man arrested on September 19 outside a Chicago store, who they first thought was only peripherally involved. They have discovered he obtained five Michigan driver's licences in 13 months, as well as a permit to haul hazardous materials, and his apartment contained a detailed map of the Incirlik airbase in Turkey.

Federal law enforcement officials now believe he could be a critical figure in the investigation.

In Hamburg, which has emerged as a hub of the hijackers' leadership cadre and possibly also the place which radicalised the leaders, investigators are eyeing Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian businessman who runs an export-import business based in the city.

His company was one of 27 organisations and individuals whose assets President George W. Bush ordered frozen last week.

Darkazanli has been linked to Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, believed to have been the head of bin Laden's financial organisation and who is at present on trial in the US on charges related to the bombing of two US embassies in east Africa in 1998.

In London, British prosecutors say Lofti Raissi, an Algerian pilot arrested last week, had given flying lessons to some of the hijackers.

But as the dragnet expands, some innocent people are being accused. Egyptian immigrant to the US Akram Mena, who bears a striking resemblance to hijacker Marwan Al-Shehhi, has been fired from his job as a welder and business at the gas station where he worked has plunged. "As soon as I saw the picture [of Al-Shehhi], I knew there would be trouble," said Mena, 37.

When it appeared, people contacted police, the FBI and newspapers, swearing that the man in the photo used to work at the gas station.

Owner Magdy Beshara said business was down 75 per cent.

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