WASHINGTON – The FBI showed the world the faces of evil yesterday – releasing pictures of all 19 terror hijackers, and announcing a probe into whether they used stolen identities, including some of Arabs killed in the Gulf War.
Attorney General John Ashcroft pleaded for any information about the 19 Middle Eastern men whose pictures were made public by authorities for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Officials said FBI agents are investigating whether the hijack team included “jackals” – people who essentially became replicas of Middle East Arab men killed fighting in Kuwait and Iraq, or were murdered by operatives of Osama bin Laden for their names, or whose identities were simply stolen.
“We’re looking at it. That’s one of the reasons we’re releasing the pictures,” an FBI official told The Post.
That scenario would follow the Frederick Forsyth spy thriller “Day of the Jackal,” in which an assassin, whose clandestine skills make his identity and nationality a mystery, is hired to kill Charles DeGaulle.
At least four of the hijackers’ identities may match up with people with similar names.
For example, Abdulaziz Alomari, a Saudi electrical engineer whose name matches one of the hijackers who crashed the jet into the Pentagon, had his passport and other papers stolen five years ago in Denver, and reported the theft to police there at the time, Saudi officials said.
The focus on the “jackal” scenario comes amid growing support for the theory that Iraqi intelligence helped Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, steal the identity of Abdul Basit during the Gulf War when Basit and his family disappeared from Kuwait.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said it isn’t clear where or when the hijackers may have obtained their false IDs.
The feds are “determining whether, when these individuals came to the United States, these were their real names or [whether] they changed their names for use with false identification in the United States,” Mueller said.
He added “one or more” of the hijackers are related.
Officials say terrorists often steal identities, but it’s difficult to prove in the case of the hijackers because their bodies may have been incinerated on the crashed planes.
FBI lab experts are trying to match fingerprints or DNA from the hijackers – taken, in some cases, from their airplane tickets – to DNA or fingerprint samples from the men they claimed to be.
That excruciatingly painstaking investigation has sent agents all over the globe, including to the hometowns of the hijackers. The FBI says eight are believed to be from Saudi Arabia and one from Egypt.
The FBI chief said “one or more” of the 19 hijackers “did have contact with al Qaeda,” bin Laden’s terror group. But he wasn’t specific about the connection.
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TIPS HOT LINE: If you recognize any of these names or phone numbers, please call the FBI at 1-866-483-5137. All calls will be kept confidential. The FBI has already received more than 100,000 tips from callers who believe they have information about the terror attacks.