by Philip Shenon, The New York Times
WASHINGTON - The F.B.I. has warned its field offices and other law enforcement agencies that terrorists could use fuel tanker trucks for an attack on synagogues or Jewish schools, law enforcement officials said today, emphasizing that they had no solid evidence that such a plot was at hand.
The alert, the latest in a series since Sept. 11 about possible terrorist threats, was issued as a result of interrogations of Al Qaeda fighters being held at the American military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the officials said.
They said that law enforcement agencies were encouraging synagogues and Jewish schools to be vigilant, but that there was no need for them to close and no information about when or where an attack might occur.
“Apparently Al Qaeda people had talked about carrying out this sort of attack,” one official said. “We’re just being cautious here. We’re not telling people to avoid their synagogues.”
The alert went out over the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, an electronic system that allows the Federal Bureau of Investigation to issue warnings to the police in all 50 states simultaneously, officials said.
The bureau did not issue the warning publicly, but details quickly became public as law enforcement agencies around the country contacted Jewish groups to alert them.
In Borough Park and Flatbush, heavily Jewish sections of Brooklyn, news of the warning spread quickly. State Assemblyman Dov Hikind said he was driving up to his district offices on 13th Avenue this afternoon when three anxious constituents rushed over to ask about it.
“I’ve been telling people to stay calm but to be alert,” Mr. Hikind said. “The Jewish community is already living with what is happening in Israel every day, but when this kind of story hits you in New York City, it brings it literally to your doorstep.”
As that alert was issued, the F.B.I. was trying to follow up on the reports of a Lebanese-American resident of Las Vegas who has told the police there that he overheard a cellphone conversation in Arabic last Saturday in which two men talked about a planned terrorist attack, possibly on Las Vegas on July 4.
Investigators are trying to determine the validity of the man’s account, which he has repeated in several interviews with news organizations in Nevada, and have asked him to take a lie-detector test. Law enforcement officials in Las Vegas have said they do not know what to make of that account, by Michael Hamdan, a 54-year-old businessman.
Mr. Hamdan, who says he moved to the United States in 1976, has reported that one of the two men said that “we are in a city of corruption, the city of prostitution, the city of gambling, the city of unbelievers.” He says that the men referred to a terrorist attack on the “city of corruption” and to an attack “on the day of freedom,” and that he took this as a reference to a Fourth of July attack on Las Vegas.
“I’m telling what I heard, what happened,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Openly, what are the odds of hearing something like that? Thousands of people could receive the call, but I get it and I speak the language?”
He said he had turned over his cellphone records to the police but had postponed an interview in which he was expected to take a lie-detector test administered by the F.B.I. He did not say if he would agree to the test, The A.P. reported.