U.S. Ties Hijackers' Money to Al Qaeda

Investigators See Cash Trail as Key

by Dan Eggen and Kathleen Day
The Washington Post
October 7, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A17934-2001Oct6&notFound=true

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

The ties to al Qaeda, the group led by Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden, include transfers of thousands of dollars from hijacking leader Mohamed Atta to al Qaeda's chief financial lieutenant in the Middle East days before the New York and Washington attacks.

U.S. officials have also traced suspicious deposits to Atta from Hamburg - where he previously was believed to be part of a student terrorist cell - and Middle Eastern countries, 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. A source familiar with the investigation said the transfer may have been arranged by the financial lieutenant, Mustafa Muhammad Ahmed. Scores of transfers subsequently poured into the hijackers' accounts, adding up to at least $500,000 in overseas funding.

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 with previous plots, well financed. The botched bombing of the trade center in 1993 is believed to have cost just $20,000.

"This was a very well-funded operation, so the finances are going to be a real key for us," said a senior official. "It's a better record of their movements than anything else. It gives us a much more solid trail to follow."

But the discoveries 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 - transactions that should have been reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Yet one U.S. senator said there is little evidence that the FBI paid close attention to such transactions.

Another man in U.S. custody, former Boston cabdriver Nabil Almarabh, who has ties to bin Laden associates, may have laundered about $15,000 through a Canadian bank that went to men arrested as terrorist suspects in the United States, according to news reports in Toronto.

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 Qaeda network and its leader, bin Laden, who lives under the protection of the ruling Taliban militia in Afghanistan.

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 authorities' 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 apprehended.

More than half of the criminal investigation team at FBI headquarters in Washington is dedicated to tracking the money, with many working from folding tables and chairs in the hallways. The bureau's lead agent on the case, FBI Deputy Director Thomas J. Pickard, is an accountant and financial crimes expert by training.

But many banking and law enforcement officials concede that the scope of the financial inquiry is overwhelming them with piles of information that are exceedingly difficult to assemble, let alone understand, officials said. The FBI alone has been deluged with tens of thousands of financial reports from banks.

"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 with a Pakistani newspaper, bragged about his group's ability to take advantage of loopholes in U.S. and European financial systems. He also said global efforts to freeze assets connected to terrorism "will not make any difference for al Qaeda or other jihad groups."

"Al Qaeda 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 in the interview with Karachi Ummat, published Sept. 28. "These are the very flaws of the Western fiscal system, which are becoming a noose for it and this system could not recuperate in spite of the passage of so many days."

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 M. 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, said 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 birthdates and other information did not correspond with the hijackers of the same name. The evidence indicates that both men were legitimate Saudi pilots with commonplace names who attended a flight training 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 industry 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, bank 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.

The problem presented by a lack of uniform name spellings is evident in a list of 330 names the FBI asked Florida banks to check about a week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, sources say. In addition to those names, the list included 424 variations and aliases that authorities believed those on the list might have employed, requiring the bankers to trace transactions for 754 names in that request alone.

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 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.

But Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee, said preliminary investigations indicate that law enforcement officials did not take notice of large cash transactions by hijackers or their associates, which should have been documented by Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs, collected by the IRS.

"It doesn't look like the FBI made much use of the significant resources available from this IRS database to identify major cash purchases by individuals and organizations connected with the terrorist organization al Qaeda," Grassley said.

Since the attacks, the FBI has received tens of thousands of SARs from banks and has used the information to obtain subpoenas targeting specific records.

Once the trail leaves the United States, it often leads to banks in countries or jurisdictions that have been uncooperative - or into accounts of shell corporations used to conceal whom the money is intended for and who sent it. Even in cooperative countries, such as Germany, the web of transactions poses a challenge for investigators.

Germany has frozen 214 suspect bank accounts holding $3.5 million since the attacks, and Finance Minister Hans Eichel last week created a central register of all bank accounts to fight terrorist financial networks.

Germany has nearly 3,000 banks. Until now, responsibility for tracking dubious accounts or transactions has rested with state - not federal - authorities.

One of the accounts frozen in Germany was held by a 43-year-old Syrian businessman, Mamoun Darkazanli, who had power of attorney for an account in the name of Mamduh Mahmud Salim. Salim is an alleged bin Laden financier who is in custody in the United States after being extradited from Germany in 1998.

Two of the hijackers, Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, had some contact with Darkazanli, who is one of 27 suspected terrorist associates named by President Bush. Darkazanli was questioned by German police, but he was quickly released.

The Darkazanli Import-Export Co. in Hamburg shut down in 1997 only to reopen in August this year, German records show. But at its listed address, an apartment, there has been little sign of activity. German officials are investigating whether it was a conduit for money to the Hamburg cell and others.

Darkazanli said he knew Atta and the other Hamburg hijackers by sight but has said he has no association with bin Laden or the Sept. 11 attacks. He said only $230 passed through the account he opened for Salim as a favor for a mutual friend.

Another key figure on the money trail is Ahmed, also known as Shaykh Saiid.

While another bin Laden aide, Mohammed Atef, has been identified by British intelligence as the apparent mastermind behind the operational planning of the attacks, Ahmed is suspected of being the paymaster who oversaw the financial end, sources said. Ahmed was named by Bush as a suspected associate of terrorists, and is the subject of a global manhunt.

Ahmed got as much as $15,000 from Atta and two other hijackers, Al-Shehhi and Waleed M. Alshehri, in the three days before the attacks. Officials in the United Arab Emirates have said they believe Ahmed left there Sept. 11 for Pakistan.

The transactions included two transfers of about $2,000 each from Atta, who sent the money from a Mail Boxes Etc. and a Giant food store in Laurel, sources said. Atta also stopped at a Kinko's in College Park, where he used a public terminal to access the Internet, sources said.

He left Sept. 9 on a flight from Baltimore to Boston, which would serve as the departure point for the two jets that flew into the World Trade Center.

The hijackers were apparently clearing out their accounts and, some investigators believe, sending back money that would be forwarded to their families. "It looks like the ultimate sign of commitment to their mission," said former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro.

The terrorists were frugal at times but spent lavishly on their final plane tickets. Of the tickets purchased by the five hijackers who boarded United Airlines Flight 175, the second plane that crashed into the World Trade Center, the least expensive cost $1,600, FBI documents show. Two of the terrorists on that plane spent $4,500 each for business-class seats.

Staff writers Karen DeYoung, Amy Goldstein and Brooke A. Masters in Washington, Robert O'Harrow and Serge Kovaleski in New York, Peter Finn in Germany, and DeNeen L. Brown in Canada contributed to this report.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

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