Agents check newspaper for terror links
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Your support makes all the difference.Investigators looking at possible links between the anthrax scare and the 11 September hijackings are checking at a newspaper they believe may have been used for messages between guerilla cells based in Florida and Western Europe.
Hamza Alghamdi and Marwan Al-Shehhi, rented flats this summer in Delray Beach, near to the Boca Raton headquarters of the Spanish-language publishing company American Media Inc. It was there the first anthrax outbreak was reported.
In what investigators see as a coincidence, the estate agent who organised the rental was the wife of the editor of The Sun, the AMI paper that employed the only person to have died of anthrax so far, Bob Stevens, a photo editor. As well as Alghamdi and Al-Shehhi, seven other hijackers are believed to have visited the apartments, at the Delray Racquet Club. Two took out subscriptions to AMI publications. In particular, Ahmed Alghamdi subscribed online to the Spanish-language tabloid Mira!, using a bogus address in Saudi Arabia.
The FBI said yesterday it was checking Mira!'s archives for messages in its personal columns. One theory is that the Florida hijackers used the paper to communicate with suspected members of the al-Qai'da network based in Spain.
The Spanish Interior Minister was in Washington yesterday to discuss the investigation into al-Qa'ida with FBI officials. Spain recently arrested six Algerians suspected of involvement in a plot to attack US targets in Europe.
If hijackers in Florida were involved in the anthrax attacks, they almost certainly had accomplices who are still at large. Confirmed anthrax samples sent to NBC in New York and the Washington offices of Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, appear to have been posted after 11 September from New Jersey.
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