France warning tipped off terrorists, say U.S. officials




From combined dispatches
One or more terror suspects may have escaped due to a premature
disclosure in France of the security concerns behind the cancellation of
Christmas flights to Los Angeles, U.S. officials said yesterday.
One official said "a chorus of groans" from the Department of Homeland
Security to the White House went out when the French made clear at the time
the cancellations had been ordered for security reasons.
Washington believed that the longer publicity could have been avoided,
"the greater the chance to catch anybody else who was suspected of being
involved," he said. "The French announcement caught everyone off guard."
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials had hoped all the
suspects could be detained as they showed up for the flights, said a senior
U.S. official familiar with the situation who did not want to be identified.
Six flights between Paris and Los Angeles were canceled on Wednesday and
Thursday at the urging of Washington after U.S. officials spotted what they
believed were suspicious names on the manifests of three Los Angeles-bound
flights.
Nine persons on the passenger list for Air France Flight AF068 to Los
Angeles on Dec. 24 - the first flight grounded - were questioned and
released. One was French and the others were four Americans, two Germans, an
Algerian and a Belgian, a French Interior Ministry spokesman said.
A source close to French anti-terror investigating judges told Reuters
in Paris: "We have not detected passengers with the profile of people
belonging to a radical Islamic group. ... All the checks so far have come to
nothing."
U.S. concerns centered on passengers whose names matched those on a U.S.
terrorism watch list, but who failed to show up for the flights, officials
said.
Among them was a Tunisian passenger reported to be a licensed pilot and
suspected of having ties to al Qaeda, which orchestrated the September 11
hijacked airliner terror attacks on the United States.
The French news agency Agence France-Presse quoted a French
anti-terrorist police source as saying the Tunisian had been the focus of a
U.S. intelligence warning, but the man was still in Tunisia, not France, and
was not known to French police.
Another senior U.S. official said it was too early to say whether a
terror plot had been thwarted.
"It's still being looked at with this whole situation," the official
said. He said crew members were of concern to U.S. investigators along with
the no-show passengers.
U.S. investigators still want to speak with a small number of people in
Paris who failed to show up for flights to Los Angeles. U.S. officials have
not publicly discussed the issue of whether potential hijackers would be
likely to check in under names known to U.S. intelligence.
Air France resumed service to Los Angeles yesterday, though the initial
flight, AF068, was delayed for nearly three hours by security checks amid
heightened airline vigilance.
The flight cancellations added to Americans' unease during the holidays
after the Bush administration increased the national threat level to its
second-highest level, orange.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday the government was
working to "make sure we are doing everything we can to protect the American
people and prevent possible attacks from happening in the first place."
Officials in Washington and Nevada disputed a published report yesterday
that the flight cancellations thwarted a possible terrorist plot to crash an
airliner in Las Vegas. Jerry Bussell, Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn's adviser on
homeland security, said federal Homeland Security officials told him there
was no known threat to Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, U.S. counterterrorism officials were turning to possible
threats next week that might target large public gatherings, such as New
Year's Eve celebrations. One U.S. official said there was no specific
information such an attack was likely, but said such gatherings obviously
would be an attractive target for terrorists hoping to inflict large-scale
casualties.

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