by Robert Hanley, New York Times
A fugitive suspected of selling false identification papers to two Sept. 11 hijackers was arrested yesterday morning at Kennedy International Airport after stepping off an overnight flight from Cairo, the authorities said.
The man, Mohamed el-Atriss, 45, was seized by United States Customs officers on a fugitive warrant the Passaic County sheriff’s office issued on Aug. 1. The warrant charged Mr. Atriss, a native of Egypt, with running a fake-document mill that sold false identification papers and driver’s licenses in Paterson and Elizabeth, N.J.
Mr. Atriss waived extradition proceedings during a court appearance in Queens yesterday afternoon and was returned to Passaic County, said the Passaic sheriff, Jerry Speziale. Mr. Atriss is scheduled to appear at a bail hearing Friday morning in New Jersey Superior Court in Paterson, court officials said.
Mr. Atriss disappeared hours before heavily armed sheriff’s officers raided his offices and his home in Union Township, N.J., on July 31.
After yesterday’s arrest, Sheriff Speziale said Mr. Atriss did not intentionally flee to Egypt before the July 31 raids but flew there on a “planned trip.” He said his aides and Mr. Atriss’s lawyer had been in periodic negotiations this month about Mr. Atriss’s returning willingly to the United States.
“He did make indications he would come back and surrender,” Sheriff Speziale said.
The case attracted considerable attention for two reasons — the reported links between the document business and the two hijackers, and complaints by the United States attorney’s office in Newark that the raids had jeopardized an F.B.I. investigation of Mr. Atriss and the ultimate destination of money generated by the business.
For a time in May and June, Sheriff Speziale’s detectives and F.B.I. agents worked together on the investigation. But after the July 31 raid, federal law enforcement officials said they were upset about Mr. Speziale’s failure to notify them before the raid and by his release of a detailed search-warrant affidavit that identified F.B.I agents by name and described some of their investigative work.
The affidavit said Mr. Atriss had told the F.B.I. sometime after Sept. 11 that several of the hijackers had contacted him before the terrorist attacks and that he had sold sham documents to a hijacker on one of the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center and to another on the plane that hit the Pentagon.
After the July 31 raids, the F.B.I. said it had not determined whether Mr. Atriss knew about the terrorist plot beforehand. No federal charges have been filed against him.
Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for Christopher Christie, the United States attorney in New Jersey, said yesterday that Mr. Atriss continued to be “of interest” to federal agents.
Mr. Atriss is charged under New Jersey law with 28 counts of making and distributing fraudulent documents. The charges do not deal with the Sept. 11 hijackers.
About a week after the raids, New Jersey’s attorney general, David Samson, ordered all county and local law enforcement agencies to get approval from his office before executing search warrants in terrorist-related cases.
At the time, Mr. Christie said he had helped draft Mr. Samson’s order. Mr. Christie said the public disclosure of investigations and techniques used in them and the release of agents’ names harmed efforts to fight crime and terrorism.