WASHINGTON (KRT) – Investigators say they have closed the circle on a key part of the financing for last month’s terrorist attacks, identifying a single Arab bank account that supplied $100,000 to the suspected hijackers a year before the attacks and received $15,000 back from the hijackers just before Sept. 11.
A top operative in Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, Mustafah Muhammad Ahmed, controlled the account, said an official involved in the FBI investigation who asked not to be identified. Suspected hijacking leader Mohamed Atta received the $100,000, the official said.
The money came from an account in the United Arab Emirates capital of Dubai. Ahmed, also known as Shaykh Saiid, is one of al-Qaida’s chief financial players in the Middle East.
In tracking the money, investigators have linked the Dubai account to $100,000 sent to Atta at least a year before the attacks, the U.S. official said.
Dennis M. Lormel, director of the FBI’s financial crimes unit, referred to the $100,000 in testimony before a congressional committee last week but made no reference to the two-way transactions.
Investigators found paperwork discarded by Atta, detailing how money was to be returned to Ahmed, the official said. He said the paperwork helped investigators quickly link Ahmed to money initially transferred to Atta from Dubai and the money that Atta returned to the United Arab Emirates.
“They weren’t the brightest candles,” the official said. “They really got sloppy. They left a lot of leads.”
Investigators also have found that some of the suspected hijackers carried large amounts of cash into the United States when they arrived. One had about $35,000 when he arrived and declared it on a customs form, but the money was not seized because it is not unusual for wealthy Middle Eastern men to travel with large amounts of cash, the official said.
It was previously disclosed that Atta and two other suspected hijackers returned $15,000 to an account in the United Arab Emirates, two to three days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But the identity of the person controlling the account was not revealed at the time. Officials in the United Arab Emirates have said that a man left for Pakistan on Sept. 11 with the $15,000.
The Bush administration has said the money trail is a crucial link in uncovering the support network for the 19 suspected hijackers, and destroying that network. To that end, about 140 financial crime specialists from an array of federal agencies have been shoehorned into an office at FBI headquarters.
Each day, new leads pour in to the team, known as the Financial Working Group. The U.S. Treasury Department downloads thousands of bank account records into the group’s computer network. The accounts are divided between 70 analysts. At 5 p.m. each day, an agent hand-carries a CD-ROM with the day’s work to the Treasury Department financial investigation unit in suburban Washington, where other agents sort through the data.
The sharing of information by the FBI reflects an unusual level of inner-agency cooperation, the official said.
“The FBI let their stuff out of the building,” the official said. “That would have been impossible before.”
The Financial Working Group’s job of identifying terrorist-linked bank accounts has been exceptionally difficult because many of the suspected hijackers have common Arabic names. Citibank, for example, has said more than 400 accounts were held by individuals with the name Mohamed Atta.
Investigators say the key to tracking the correct accounts is to ensure that they link old addresses, post office boxes or credit cards to more current addresses used by the suspected hijackers.
© 2001, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.