The FBI on Monday night issued an extraordinary alert of a possible terrorist attack, warning Americans that a Yemeni man and his associates may be planning an assault as early as Tuesday.
FBI officials were not able to be precise about the target, saying only that the attack could be aimed at U.S. interests either in this country or abroad.
“Recent information indicates a planned attack may occur in the United States or against U.S. interests on or around 02/12/02,” the dispatch said. “One or more operatives may be involved in the attack.”
The FBI and other federal law-enforcement agencies, already on high alert since the Sept. 11 attacks, have ratcheted up precautions since the Winter Olympics began Friday in Salt Lake City. But there was no indication that the new alert was connected to the Olympics, which has been blanketed in extraordinary security.
Officials were not specific about the source of the information that led to the warning, but they said it came from the military’s ongoing operations in Afghanistan, where numerous documents and other evidence have been unearthed, as well as from interviews of Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The FBI distributed the alert to the 18,000 police agencies throughout the country on its network and urged the public to be vigilant.
The bureau has issued several such warnings since Sept. 11, and Atty. Gen. John Aschroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller have said repeatedly that public awareness is crucial to the government’s anti-terrorism efforts.
Monday’s warning, which is posted on the FBI Web site at www.fbi.gov, named Fawaz Yahya al-Rabeei as the primary operative who might be involved in the attack.
Al-Rabeei is a Yemeni citizen born in Saudi Arabia in 1979. He may be using any number of aliases, including Furqan, Sa’id, Musharraf and Furqan the Chechen, the bureau’s alert said. He may be traveling on Yemeni passport No. 00452004, the FBI said.
FBI officials had little additional information on al-Rabeei, saying they did not know where he was, nor could they provide a detailed physical description. The alert did not say if he was suspected of having any ties to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network.
The alert also named 15 “known associates” of al-Rabeei, most of them Yemenis but also including Saudis and Tunisians.
The warning concluded tersely, “All individuals should be considered extremely dangerous.”
The FBI has issued four major alerts since Sept. 11, but this was by far the most specific, providing a specific date and naming certain individuals. Generally, the alerts have involved vague threats, unnamed perpetrators and undefined time periods.
The lack of specificity has led to some ridicule and frustration among members of the public as well as state and city police, who have complained that the FBI has not provided them with sufficient information.
There have also been more specific alerts citing threats to crop-dusting airplanes, nuclear power plants and operators of Internet sites.
At times it has been unclear exactly what the warnings mean, since the FBI has urged law enforcement and the public essentially to be on alert constantly since Sept. 11.
So far, no attacks have followed the alerts, and while that has led to some criticism of the FBI, Ashcroft has suggested the warnings may have prompted the public to adopt a higher level of vigilance that has thwarted potential attacks.
The FBI’s last general alert was issued Dec. 3 and was originally to last until early this year, but it then was extended through the Winter Olympics.
Al-Rabeei’s “known associates” include Issam al-Makhlafi, Ahmad al-Bidani, Bashir al-Sharari, Bassam al-Nahdi, Abdulaziz bin Otash, Omar al-Hubishi, Mustafa al-Ansari, Ammar al-Wa’eli, Alyan al-Wa’eli, Shuhour al-Sabri, Samir al-Maktawi and Abdulrab al-Sayfi.
Many of the men were born in Saudi Arabia and have become Yemeni citizens. Saudi Arabia, the homeland of some of the Sept. 11 hijackers and bin Laden, has proven a fertile breeding ground for Islamic radicals, though the government often expels them and they end up taking refuge in other countries.
The FBI also named Abu al-Tunisi and Abu al-Jeddawi, both of whom it identified as “possibly Tunisian.” The final two men being sought were Riyadh Shikawi and Amin al-Zumari.
