9-11 terrorist mastermind linked to German city

WASHINGTON -- The man suspected of masterminding the Sept. 11 terror attacks may have once attended college in the United States and is believed to have visited the German city where chief hijacker Mohammed Atta lived in 1999, officials said Thursday.

Officials suspect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a Kuwaiti-born lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, met with Atta or members of his cell, but they have not received direct evidence of any contacts between them, one U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Since Sept. 11, evidence has mounted that Mohammed was chief among the bin Laden lieutenants organizing the attacks, counterterrorism officials said. He provided some of the money used in the attacks, and Abu Zubaydah -- another of the alleged organizers now in U.S. custody -- has identified Mohammed as the organizer.

The official said U.S. authorities have received reports that Mohammed attended college in the United States but had no more detail.

The independent Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas reported this week that he transferred between two schools in North Carolina in the 1980s.

A spokeswoman at Chowan College in northeastern North Carolina told The Associated Press said a Khaled Al-Shaikh Mohammad attended the school in spring 1984, when it was a two-year institution.

Mohammed -- who is 37, according to Interpol -- would have been of college age in the mid-1980s.

Spokeswoman Melanie Edwards declined to provide further information about the student, including whether he transferred to another school in the state.

Chowan College, which became a four-year college in 1992, is in Murfreesboro, N.C., near the Virginia border and about 100 miles northeast of Raleigh.

Spokesmen at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro and UNC-Charlotte said they had no records of a student by that name -- or any of the aliases listed for Mohammed on the FBI's Web site -- attending in the 1980s.

Officials at North Carolina State University in Raleigh were unable to say immediately Thursday whether they had had a student by any of those names.

U.S. counterterrorism officials believe Mohammed went to Afghanistan to join the mujahedeen fighters opposing the Soviet occupation in the late 1980s. He now has Pakistani citizenship, according to Kuwaiti officials and Interpol.

Al-Qabas also reported that he once worked for Abdul-Rab Rasool Sayyaf, an anti-American Afghan warlord who goes by "Professor." During the war against the Soviets and the Najibullah government, Sayyaf was chief of the Ittehad-e-Islami group, which had the largest number of Arab fighters in its ranks.

Interpol describes Mohammed as 5-foot-5, weighing 160 pounds, sometimes wearing beard and glasses.

Mohammed surfaced again the mid-1990s, as an associate -- and possibly a relative -- of Ramzi Yousef, working with him on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot and a 1995 plan to bomb or hijack trans-Pacific airliners heading for the United States, according to U.S. officials.

Mohammed has been charged for his role in the 1995 airline plot, and remains one of the FBI's most-wanted terrorists. The U.S. government is offering a reward of up to $25 million for information leading to his capture -- the same reward offered for bin Laden.

He has not been charged for the Sept. 11 attacks.

He is believed to be in Afghanistan or nearby. Officials say he remains in bin Laden's inner circle and continues to plot terrorist attacks.

Bin Laden lieutenants Tawfiq Attash Khallad and finance chief Shaikh Saiid al-Sharif have also been linked to the hijackers.