Fletcher Oklahoma

Officials said such calls are not typically recorded, suggesting that the FBI may have reconstructed the conversation from interviews.Mrs Sweeney, 35, had worked for American Airlines for 12 years, usually taking weekend duty so she could spend more time during the week with her husband and two young children.As soon as it became clear the plane had been hijacked, Mrs Sweeney, identified by investigators by her middle name, Amy, called the American Airlines flight services manager, Michael Woodward, who was on the ground at Boston's Logan International airport. The transcripts suggest she was calm as she relayed the events unfolding around her."This plane has been hijacked," Mrs Sweeney said. "A hijacker also cut the throat of a business-class passenger, and he appears to be dead."Investigators have identified five suspected hijackers on the flight – Satam Al Suqami, Waleed M Alshehri, Wail Alshehri, Abdulaziz Alomari and Mohamed Atta, the man believed to have actually taken charge of the plane's controls.Mrs Sweeney said she only saw four of the men All seemed to be of Middle Eastern origin. Three had been sitting in business class and at least one of them spoke English "very well". She noted the exact seats in which the hijackers had been sitting: an instant aid to investigators trying to identify the men.It is apparently unclear from the transcript where Mrs Sweeney was when she was talking to Mr Woodward or what type of phone she used. But as she was relating details about the hijackers, the men were storming the front of the plane and "had just gained access to the cockpit".Then the plane changed direction and began a rapid descent. Mrs Sweeney tried to contact the cockpit but could not reach anyone.Officials at American Airlines said they had been asked by the FBI not to reveal any further details.Mrs Sweeney's family said her actions were typical of a "fine, young woman"..

A man believed to be one of the linchpins behind the attacks on New York and Washington has been arrested in suburban Chicago, American investigators said yesterday.In what could prove to be an important breakthrough in the case, Nabil Al Marabh, whose nationality is not known, was picked up in the small town of Justice, on Wednesday night, and arrested on an outstanding warrant for assault and battery that was issued in Boston last December. Mr Al Marabh, 34, has been linked to two suspected hijackers who flew out of Boston separately on the planes that crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York. He has also been named as a member of Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network by a former Boston cab driver who is on trial in Jordan for attempted bombings.The FBI spent several days looking for Mr Al Marabh, and the agents initially thought they had cornered him when they raided a house in suburban Detroit on Tuesday where the mailbox bore his name.Mr Al Marabh turned out not to be there, but FBI agents stumbled upon a trove of documents in Arabic alluding to attacks on airports and to a plot to bomb a US military base in Turkey They also found a stash of false identity papers. Three north Africans in the house were arrested and are due to appear in court on document falsification charges today.It appears that the FBI followed Mr Al Marabh on a journey due west from Detroit to Chicago. They discovered that on the day of the Detroit arrests he was on the Michigan-Indiana border obtaining a duplicate driving licence. He is believed to have been part of a cell connected to Mr bin Laden – the chief suspect in the terrorist plot – located in Boston where he had lived on and off since about 1990.Mr Al Marabh is also thought to have maintained an address in Florida, where a number of the suspected hijackers had lived and obtained pilot training. Apparently he left Boston, where he had a wife and son and various licences to work as a taxi or truck driver, pending a court conviction last December for a knife assault. He was supposed to have started serving a prison sentence in March but went missing.His arrest appears to be a precious piece of good news as the investigation grows increasingly bogged down in a morass of false identities and deliberate decoys, thought to have been set up by the hijacking crew.

At least five of the people named in an official list of hijackers that the FBI issued last Friday are now believed to have been victims of identity theft and are still alive.One suspected hijacker initially thought to have perished on board the Los Angeles-bound American Airlines plane – flight 77 – which slammed into the Pentagon, is now believed to be alive. In August, the CIA received a tip that Khalid Al Midhar, and another man whose name appeared on the same American Airlines passenger list, Nawaq Alhamzi, were in the US.Both men were wanted in connection with the bombing of the ship, the USS Cole in Yemen last year, and both, it later transpired, had spent time in San Diego at a pilot training school. But no trace of them was found before 11 September, and the warning about them was not passed to the airlines.Now, however, the FBI believes Mr Al Midhar was not on the American Airlines plane at all and that he either lent out his identity to conceal that of another hijacker, or wanted the authorities to believe he was dead so that he would gain time to leave the country.Confusion over the identity of the hijackers has greatly complicated the investigation on many fronts. On Wednesday, the FBI asked banks across the US to check the names of 21 suspected hijackers and associates against their records "Any financial institution that identifies ... a relationship, such as a bank account, or a transaction, such as a wire transfer, with any of the named suspects should complete and file a suspicious activity report," said a special alert distributed to all financial institutions.The value of any such information, however, depends on having the right names in the first place. It was not clear if the list of 21 names included only people whom the FBI felt sure were represented by their true identity.The worldwide banking system has become an increasingly important focus of the investigation, with American political leaders seeing financial interdiction as a crucial tool in the struggle to crack down on the perpetrators of the terrorism attacks.The Bush administration has requested co-operation on financial policing from governments around the globe. But this effort, too, seems fraught with potential frustrations.A number of bank accounts in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Sudan, as well as one with Barclays Bank in London, have been identified as key links in Mr bin Laden's financial network.

But it seems the accounts in question have long since been closed.US Treasury investigators believe al-Qa'ida relies on a secretive network of financial brokers known by the Hindi name, hawala. The system works through transfers being made through a complicated barter system that relies on personal contacts, and on keeping movements of money undetected by normal computer tracking mechanisms.The hawala system has its origins in the Indian subcontinent, but investigators say that it has spread to many other countries, including the US.It is not just the money that has been kept deep in the shadows. As the US looks around the world for evidence of Mr bin Laden's network, it is identifying countries and regions well known either for rampant criminality, or porous international borders, or secretive banking systems. The FBI has asked at least six South American countries – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador and Colombia – to investigate connections between local Arab nationals and any extremist Islamist groups.Panama has been asked to look into its financial system for evidence of activity by bin Laden operatives.Local police are also digging into the case of three Afghans who were arrested in the Cayman Islands. At the end of August this year, a radio station in the Caymans received an anonymous letter warning that these three people might be involved with Mr bin Laden in preparing "a major terrorist act against the US via an airline or airlines".The three Afghans are believed to have entered the Cayman Islands from Cuba using Pakistani passports, for reasons that remain to be determined.. We seem to have seen it all before, and not very long ago.