ChicSunTimes

2 linked to hijackers' fake IDs

October 2, 2001

BY STEVE WARMBIR AND FRANK MAIN STAFF REPORTERS

Two Virginia residents were ordered held without bail Monday on charges they helped hijackers in the Sept. 11 attack get fake IDs.

Luis Martinez-Flores and Kenys Galicia, both of suburban Washington D.C., helped four suspected terrorists, authorities said Monday.

Martinez-Flores' name first surfaced on a Sept. 19 list that the FBI sent to banks looking for financial transactions as part of the terrorism investigation, authorities said.

Meanwhile, in a speech on Monday, President Bush related the latest progress in the terrorism investigation.

In all, investigators have frozen $6 million linked to terrorism in about 50 bank accounts, with about 30 of them in the United States.

Bush also announced the arrest over the weekend of a man who along with five other people were charged in a 1991 indictment with killing two U.S. citizens in the hijacking of a Pan Am flight in Pakistan in September 1986.

In all, 21 people were killed. The man, Zayd Hassan Abd Al-Latif Masud Al Safarini, was arrested Friday after he was released in Pakistan after serving time.

The man isn't associated with Osama bin Laden's terror group, Bush said, but he mentioned the arrest to show the extensive scope of the U.S. terrorism investigation.

New Chicago links came to light Monday in the ongoing terrorism investigation as a man was held in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on charges out of Detroit and Chicago.

Youssef Hmimssa was wanted for questioning after a trove of counterfeit documents with an alias he once used was found in a Detroit home that had been searched as part of the terrorism investigation, authorities said.

Investigators raided that home on Sept. 17, looking for possible bin Laden operative Nabil al Marabh. Al Marabh wasn't there--he was arrested later in suburban Chicago-- but three other men were taken into custody along with the counterfeit documents.

Earlier this year, on May 23, Hmimssa, working under the alias Patrick Vuillaume, was arrested on federal charges that he and a northwest suburban Chicago waiter stole credit card numbers and racked up charges of more than $100,000, according to a court affidavit filed by a Secret Service agent.

Hmimssa, a one-time Chicago cabbie, was released in early June pending his trial but took off from his Chicago home a few days later.

Also on Monday, the Chicago office of the FBI shot down an ABC News report that the agency had thwarted a terrorist plan to bomb the Sears Tower.

"Their story is categorically false," FBI spokesman Ross Rice said.

-- Anonymous, October 02, 2001