WORLD Stepping up terrorist hunt

'Be On The Lookout' alerts were issued by the FBI.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
Global intelligence and police agencies are on a worldwide hunt for terrorists with ties to places as disparate as Boston, Islamabad and Panama City, part of a U.S. scramble to head off what officials fear could be a massive attack this summer.
Warning that Al-Qaida is plotting a deadly attack in the United States, the FBI reinvigorated a manhunt Wednesday for seven terrorist suspects and launched a massive canvass of American Muslims in the hopes of gathering fresh intelligence.
A steady stream of credible new information from multiple sources suggests that the terror network Al-Qaida is nearly ready to attack again, Attorney General John Ashcroft said. Ashcroft said that in an ominous warning after the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, an Al-Qaida spokesman revealed that arrangements for an attack on America were 90 percent complete.
"This disturbing intelligence indicates Al-Qaida's specific intention to hit the United States hard," Ashcroft said at a news conference Wednesday with FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Wanted for questioning
The U.S. Justice Department released a list of seven people wanted for questioning Wednesday. Ashcroft asked American citizens to give any information they can, and foreign governments have been recruited.
Even Panama, a country known more for its canal than terrorism, has been included in the search. Officials said Wednesday they are trying to track down a man identified as Adnan Gulshair El Shukrijumah of Saudi Arabia.
Panamanian Security Council Chief Ramiro Jarvis said El Shukrijumah arrived in Panama legally from the United States in April 2001 -- five months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks -- and stayed in Panama for 10 days. He also visited Trinidad and Tobago for six days the next month.
"We don't know exactly what he did during his stay and it is important to find out," Jarvis said.
Migration records show El Shukrijumah returned to the United States, Interior Department spokesman David Salayandia said. The last place he was seen, however, was in Panama.
The revelation was one of the few indicators that have tied Latin America to the global terrorism threat. Officials have long worried that terrorists would use the region to attack the United States, but so far there has been little evidence to support that fear.
Two from Canada
Two of the suspects were also from Canada, according to Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan. She said there was no evidence they are in the country, but she urged Canadians to report suspicious activity.
"We know that we are not immune to terrorism, and that we must be vigilant," she said.
One of the men, Abderraouf Jdey, a Tunisian who obtained Canadian citizenship in 1995, was among five people who left suicide messages on videotapes recovered in Afghanistan at the home of Mohammed Atef. Atef, reportedly Osama bin Laden's military chief, was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2001.
Pakistani security officials are also looking for information on Aafia Siddiqui, 32, a Pakistani woman who received a biology degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and wrote a doctoral thesis on neurological sciences at Brandeis University, outside Boston, in 2001.
Authorities say she returned to Pakistan shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks with her husband and three children. Her whereabouts have been a mystery since March 2003, when the FBI issued a global alert for her arrest for possible links to Al-Qaida. The FBI also wants to talk to her husband.
U.S. authorities have not alleged that Siddiqui is a full-fledged member of Al-Qaida, but think she could be a "fixer" -- someone with knowledge of the United States who can support and help get things done for other operatives.
A senior Pakistani security official told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the United States had made no new request for Pakistan to find Siddiqui but that one issued last year was still in effect despite turning up nothing at the time. The official said she had gone underground, and it wasn't even known if she was still in Pakistan.
Indictments
Suspect Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a native of the Comoros Republic in the Indian Ocean, has been indicted in the United States in the 1998 Al-Qaida bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 231 people.
Another suspect, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, is under indictment in the United States for the embassy bombings.
A 25-year-old U.S. citizen, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, is also a suspect. He goes by the names Adam Pearlman and Abu Suhayb Al-Amriki. Mueller says he attended Al-Qaida training camps and has served as an Al-Qaida translator.
Gadahn says on an Islamic Internet site that he grew up on a goat ranch in Riverside County, Calif., and converted to Islam in his later teenage years after moving to Garden Grove, Calif.
Amer El-Maati, who was born in Kuwait, is wanted by the FBI for questioning about possible Al-Qaida links.
The threat information doesn't contain specifics about a time, place or method of attack, and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said there were no immediate plans to raise the nation's color-coded threat level.
But Ashcroft said a number of high-profile events leading up to the presidential election in November present attractive targets. Those include the G-8 economic summit in Georgia, the political conventions in Boston and New York, the dedication of the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington on Memorial Day weekend and Fourth of July celebrations.
A federal law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the threats contained warnings about a spectacular attack that would result in "mass casualties."
Alerts issued by FBI
The FBI issued "Be On The Lookout" alerts Wednesday, asking the public and local law enforcement for help finding seven people with ties to Al-Qaida. It's not known whether the people are thought to be involved in a terror plot or whether they're in the United States.
Ashcroft described the seven as "armed and dangerous."
Most of the names were already fixtures on the FBI's Web site. Six of the seven have been sought for months -- or, in some cases, years -- by the FBI.
The FBI will also begin conducting interviews nationwide, similar to the program it launched before the war in Iraq in which agents interviewed thousands of Iraqi-Americans to gather information.
Mueller and Ashcroft declined to say which communities the FBI would focus on, saying the interviews would be driven by intelligence. But such sweeps in the past have focused on Muslim and Arab communities, and officials didn't dispute that a large number of the interviews would again take place there.