"Tourist Copters in New York City a Terror Target"

Monday, August 9, 2004

Tourist Copters in New York City a Terror Target
By DAVID JOHNSTON and ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York (NY) Times


WASHINGTON, - Pakistan has given American officials what they regard as
credible and specific information indicating that Al Qaeda has
considered using tourist helicopters in terror attacks in New York City,
domestic security officials said Sunday.

As a result, the officials said, security measures for helicopter
operators in New York City will be stepped up in a new directive as
early as this week. Among the new measures under review is a requirement
for operators to conduct airport-style screenings of passengers for
suspicious items, said an official with the Department of Homeland
Security who had been briefed on the plan. So far, no groundings of
helicopter operators are planned.

Personnel at several Manhattan helicopter charter companies said Sunday
that although they had already conducted varying degrees of passenger
screening themselves, they had heard of no specific safety concerns in
recent days from the federal government.

Separately, a senior American intelligence official said that more than
1,000 computer disks had been seized by British authorities during
arrests last week of 12 suspected operatives for Al Qaeda in England.

The seized files are now being subjected to intensive analysis by
British and American intelligence, but they appear to contain evidence
of previously unknown terrorist planning activities in the United
States, the official said. As a result, Bush administration officials
are preparing for the possibility of expanded public and private threat
alerts. 

The senior official, who has been briefed on the information from
Britain and Pakistan, would not discuss specific operations that were
emerging from the new computer data, saying that the evaluation of the
material was still under way.

The Bush administration raised the country's terror alert level on Aug.
1, after computer information turned over by authorities in Pakistan
about possible reconnaissance gathering by operatives of Al Qaeda led
American officials to tighten security at five financial institutions in
New York, New Jersey and Washington.

The senior intelligence official and security advisers to President Bush
have said they increasingly see the intelligence about the financial
institutions and about possible plans by Al Qaeda to stage an attack in
the United States as part of a unified terror plot to disrupt the
elections in the fall. 

The reconnaissance missions appear to have been conducted three or four
years ago, but officials said they considered the information about Al
Qaeda's possible interest in things like helicopters and financial
institutions to be critical in understanding how or where terrorists
might strike, if not when. 

"Current intelligence streams, concurrent with our own threat analysis,
is leading us in this direction," the homeland security official said of
the threat to chartered helicopters.

Still, intelligence officials have long pointed out that Al Qaeda has
planned for possible attacks over several years only to abandon many of
them. It was still unknown whether the group's top leaders had decided
whether to carry out any specific plot against the financial companies
or tourist helicopters. 

An article in the Aug. 8 issue of Time magazine said that after
conducting surveillance of the Prudential building in Newark, operatives
of Al Qaeda wrote a report suggesting that a limousine carrying enough
explosives to destroy the building might be able to enter the parking
lot more easily than trucks or vans. A law enforcement official who has
received regular briefings on counterterrorism matters in the region
confirmed the report on Sunday. 

The computer information found last month in Pakistan and last week in
Britain continues to yield new details about who carried out the
reconnaissance operations at the five financial institutions in 2000 and
2001, the official said.

The authorities now believe that one of the men who conducted the
surveillance at the New York Stock Exchange was Adnan G. el-Shukrijumah,
who was born in Saudi Arabia, has relatives in Florida and on May 26 was
the subject of an F.B.I. bulletin seeking information about seven men
with suspected ties to terrorists.

Some intelligence officials believe that Mr. Shukrijumah is a close
associate of Abu Issa al-Hindi, a suspected operative of Al Qaeda who
was one of the men arrested last week in Britain and who was believed to
have traveled to the United States at the direction of senior terrorist
leaders to supervise and take part in the surveillance of the financial
institutions.

There are no charges in the United States against Mr. Shukrijumah, but
officials said investigators had been seeking him since shortly after
the Sept. 11 terror attacks because he is believed to have taken flight
training and is fluent in English.

The F.B.I. said in its bulletin that Mr. Shukrijumah carried a Guyanese
passport but might try to enter the United States with a Saudi, Canadian
or Trinidadian passport. One law enforcement official said recent
sightings had suggested that he has been in Mexico and Honduras, but
those have not been confirmed.

In London, one Western official said that in coming days there will be a
focus on the legal process, with American and British officials working
to see if, under British law, there is enough information to hold the 11
men arrested with Mr. Hindi. 

An article in The Washington Post on Sunday said that Mazen Mokhtar,
from New Brunswick, N.J., was under investigation because of suspected
ties to Babar Ahmad, a computer specialist who was among the men
arrested in London last week. Citing an affidavit released Friday by the
United States attorney's office in Connecticut, the report said Mr.
Mokhtar operated a Web site identical to one used by Mr. Ahmad to
solicit money for terrorist groups.

Reached at his home on Sunday, Mr. Mokhtar said, "I am not interested in
giving any interview, at least until I better understand what is going
on."

On Sunday, President Bush's security advisers said some of the
surveillance activity and possible plots might be part of an effort by
Al Qaeda to disrupt the November elections. They said they believed that
the arrests may have interfered with at least some of the group's plans.


"I certainly think that by our actions now that we have disrupted it,"
said Frances Fragos Townsend, Mr. Bush's domestic security adviser, on
the television program "Fox News Sunday." "The question is, have we
disrupted all of it or a part of it? And we're working through an
investigation to uncover that."

Some democrats have expressed skepticism about the timing of the
administration's reports about possible terrorist plots, and they have
specifically accused the White House of playing politics when it
recently stepped up the terror alert based on possible actions by Al
Qaeda that happened more than three years ago. 

In an appearance on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," Condoleezza
Rice, the national security adviser, dismissed such complaints of
political motivation. 

"The idea that you would somehow play politics with the security of the
American people, that you not go out and warn if you have casing reports
on buildings that are highly specific - are you really supposed to not
tell?" she said.

Intelligence officials were continuing to analyze new material from
Pakistan on Sunday. While no specific timing for any potential attack
has been established, "we've seen that Al Qaeda appears determined to
attack again in the near term,'' a government official who spoke on
condition of anonymity said Sunday. 

Officials say they are particularly concerned about the possibility of
an attack before the November election, but they say there is still no
evidence that indicates Al Qaeda moved from the planning to actual
preparations to launch such an attack. 

In New York, tourist helicopters operate out of three main heliports and
are considered "an area of identified risk based on specific and
credible intelligence that United States intelligence officials have
recently received," the domestic security official said. "This is
restricted to New York right now," the official said.

Counterterrorism officials have been concerned that terrorists might
seek to use a wide range of vehicles and other instruments for attacks,
from crop-duster planes and hazardous-material trucks to underwater
bombs carried by scuba divers because people who work in those
industries are generally subjected to less rigorous security measures.

The possible use of chartered helicopters in a terrorist attack has also
attracted fresh scrutiny from the F.B.I., officials said. Helicopters
"are on the list with everything else - it's another one of the areas
we're concerned about," a federal law enforcement official who spoke on
condition of anonymity said Sunday. 

Helicopter tour operators in Manhattan offer a popular way for tourists,
usually up to seven at a time, to get an aerial view of landmarks. Tours
can be as quick as five to seven minutes.

At the West Side heliport overlooking the Hudson River, the city posted
two police officers last week near the gate where some 600 to 700
helicopter flights take off and land each week, said Edward Miletich,
who works for Air Pegasus, which operates the heliport, and Rich Curry,
a pilot for New York Helicopter, a tour and charter company. But the
move appeared to be a response to the news about Al Qaeda's
reconnaissance of nearby financial companies rather than specific
information from the federal government.


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