Sunday November 4 5:38 PM ET

Possible Al-Qaida Operative Detained

By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - A suspected Al-Qaida operative observed meeting with hijacker Khalid Almihdhar in Malaysia in 2000 has been detained in the Middle East for questioning in connection with prior terrorist attacks, officials said Sunday.

The man was being questioned by intelligence agents about his possible contact with the hijacker, his suspected involvement in the USS Cole bombing and a foiled plot to bomb a hotel in Jordan filled with Americans during the millennium celebrations, officials said.

The man was videotaped by Malaysian security authorities in a January 2000 meeting with Almihdhar and other supporters of Osama bin Laden and his network.

At the time, neither Almihdhar nor the man now in custody were known to be connected to terrorism. Officials did not provide the man's name. They said he has not been charged with any offense.

However, the meeting took on new significance this past summer when information developed in the bombing of the Cole suggested the man now being held in the Middle East might have been connected to the plot, officials said.

The CIA in August then placed Almihdhar and one of his associates, Nawaf Alhazmi, on a terrorist watch list, but immigration officials discovered the two soon-to-be-hijackers were already in the United States, officials said.

Almihdhar and Alhazmi weren't located before they boarded an American Airlines jetliner on Sept. 11 that crashed into the Pentagon.

The man recently detained is ``very important'' because he's a midlevel operative in the al-Qaida network, said a retired intelligence official.

He was arrested in the Gulf region within the past two weeks and was taken to Jordan, where he's being interrogated, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official added that the man is linked to three terrorist operations: the Millenium bombing at the Radisson hotel in Jordan, the Cole bombing and, now, the Sept. 11 attacks by virtue of his being videotaped in Malaysia with two of the hijackers.

The arrest of the suspected al-Qaida operative in the Middle East comes as the CIA and FBI continue to seek out and detain people linked to the hijackers through phone contacts, Internet communications and financial transactions.

Federal prosecutors say a Pakistani man who was detained in Detroit and is being held on a voter registration fraud charge in North Carolina has been connected by evidence to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Intiaz Ahmed Siddiqui, 31, was arrested in the Detroit area and was indicted last Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Greensboro, N.C., on one count of voter registration fraud, according to Lynn Clower, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office.

``He said he was a U.S. citizen when indeed he was a citizen of Pakistan,'' Clower said.

During a detention hearing last week in Detroit, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jane Terbush said the government had information that linked Siddiqui to at least two of the hijackers.

Terbush said the government considers it a ``very, very serious matter.''

Attorney Neil DeBlois, who is representing Siddiqui, said Friday his client has been held since Sept. 22 on a relatively minor charge just so the government can try to build a case of terrorism against him.

DeBlois said his client is an electrical engineer who came into the United States legally in July 2000 for work. He was employed in California and recently accepted a job in Grand Rapids.

In a seven-page affidavit provided to DeBlois, an FBI agent wrote that Siddiqui visited an Internet travel site at the same time as one of the hijackers, and the pair may have communicated, DeBlois said. He said the affidavit ``reads like a cheap novel.''

-- Anonymous, November 04, 2001