CURT ANDERSON, The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Al-Qaida was attempting to bring additional hijackers into the United States just a few weeks before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, U.S. officials now believe.
It is unclear from court documents that outline the theory whether these unidentified individuals were intended to provide additional manpower aboard the four jets that were commandeered or if the plot was to include the hijackings of more aircraft on that day.
But the documents, filed last week by the Justice Department in the case of accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, say that the attempt to augment terrorist ranks in August 2001 “suggests an operation much more in flux” than previously believed.
An exhaustive investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks by the House and Senate intelligence committees concluded this summer that the pilots and other hijackers who did carry out the plot were all in the United States by June 2001.
Those 19 hijackers flew three aircraft into the World Trade Center’s twin towers and the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, killing about 3,000 people in the worst terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil.
One key unanswered question about the plot is why the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania had only four hijackers aboard, while the others had five. That plane crashed after an uprising led by passengers who had found out about the other hijackings through cell phone calls to friends and relatives.
One theory being explored by the FBI and Justice Department is that an al-Qaida operative known to investigators had been in the United States but left before the plan was carried out, according to several senior law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Al-Qaida could have been attempting late in the plot to replace this individual, whom the officials would not further identify, or might have sought to add personnel to all of the planes.
The court documents revealing the al-Qaida effort to add hijackers were filed last week in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. The government is appealing a district judge’s ruling that Moussaoui, an avowed al-Qaida adherent who was training to be a pilot, should have access to captured al-Qaida leaders to bolster his claim that he was not part of the Sept. 11 plot.
The government says that al-Qaida’s attempts to bring more individuals into the United States undercuts Moussaoui’s contention that he was not involved because he “was not activated to replace a non-pilot hijacker.”
The leading theory among government investigators is that Moussaoui was to take part in a second wave of attacks in the United States.