http://www.pioneerplanet.com/seven-days/5/news/docs/037159.htm

Published: Sunday, December 10, 2000

New Year's Eve terrorist attacks are possible with dawn of Y2K+1

BOSTON GLOBE

Echoing warnings surrounding last year's Y2K celebrations, U.S. officials are bracing for the possibility of new attacks timed to another New Year's Eve.

Already, U.S. citizens have been cautioned to restrict their movements worldwide, particularly in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, after the bombing in October of the USS Cole in Yemen and a resurgence of violence in the Middle East.

But after a crash course in countering terrorism last year -- when plots were foiled in eight countries -- U.S. officials have been warily eyeing the calendar and, to many cultures, the genuine dawning of a new century.

``We're looking at whether there's a methodology regarding the arrival of the real millennium,'' Michael Rolince, the FBI's chief of international terrorism operations, said Thursday.

No special precautions or closings have been planned on U.S. borders to coincide with the arrival of 2001, said a U.S. immigration spokeswoman. And the State Department has not issued any new alerts that mention the prospect of millennial terrorism.

``That does not mean they will not be forthcoming,'' said Christopher Limour, a State Department spokesman. The alerts currently in place are not due to expire until after the first week of January.

New details that surfaced in the probe of the Cole bombing have focused renewed attention on possible clustering of terror attacks, authorities said.

U.S. officials have said the Oct. 12 suicide attack on the Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed and 39 were injured, was the second plotted bombing of a U.S. destroyer in Aden harbor, the first of which was planned for last Jan. 3. That planned assault -- on the USS The Sullivans -- failed when a small boat laden with explosives sank in the harbor.

That scheme was planned within a week of other orchestrated terror attempts in Jordan and Israel.

U.S. officials suspect the perpetrators of the Cole attack and the other planned attacks may have close ties to Saudi terror sponsor Osama bin Laden, whom they have accused of the 1998 bombing of two embassies in Africa that killed 200 people. But they have not been able to definitively link bin Laden with suspects in the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil planned for 2000 celebrations.

In January, a federal grand jury in Seattle indicted Algerian Ahmed Rassam, who was arrested as he tried to cross the Canadian border in a car full of explosives and four homemade detonators.

An alleged accomplice of Rassam's, who has been indicted in Seattle for allegedly plotting a ``terrorist act,'' was arrested in Algeria in the past two months, the New York Times reported Thursday, citing Clinton administration sources.

The United States and Canada had offered up to $5 million last year for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Abdelmajid Dahoumane, 33.

Dahoumane allegedly shared a hotel room in Vancouver, Canada during the month before Ressam was arrested in Washington state.

Algerian officials have reportedly been questioning Dahoumane about what he did with Ressam in Canada and the United States and about his possible ties to binLaden.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Seattle on Thursday declined to comment on Dahoumane's arrest or whether U.S. officials would be seeking his extradition from Algeria to face terrorism charges in Seattle.

-- (news@of.note), December 15, 2000

Answers

From earlier this year also see 'Clinton Says Bin Laden in Y2K Plot' (AP).

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003Ard

-- (news@of.note), December 15, 2000.

Got beans? Got Tuna? Got a portable bomb shelter?

-- (y2k@prepped.still), December 15, 2000.