At college campuses, FBI investigates terror links

MOSCOW, Idaho -- The University of Idaho seems an unlikely backdrop for international terrorism.

Tucked into a small town amid the rolling wheat fields of the Palouse, the campus of about 9,700 students is far removed from regional and national centers of commerce or government.

Yet FBI agents on the hunt for potential terrorists are turning their attention to this and other college campuses, many in small-town America, where foreign students for decades have blended into diverse student populations.

The reasons are simple: Foreign exchange programs make it easy for people from other countries to arrive and stay in the United States for long periods, many campuses are in rural settings with few police officers, and they often have sophisticated communications links to the outside world, such as high-speed Internet access.

In Idaho, agents recently arrested two people with ties both to the University of Idaho and to a group suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups and is investigating two others.

'All over the country'

"It's clear there's activity like this all over the country," said an FBI agent investigating the University of Idaho cases, talking about the cases on condition of anonymity.

In North Carolina, suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, recently arrested in Pakistan, graduated from North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro in 1986. He had first attended tiny Chowan College in Murfreesboro, a town of about 2,000 residents in the northeast part of the state.

Sami Al-Arian, who studied at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, was arrested recently on charges of operating a terrorist cell while a professor at the University of South Florida. His brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, who spent more than three years in prison on secret evidence linking him to terrorists before he was deported last year, also studied at North Carolina A&T. Both maintained they were innocent.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration began taking a closer look at foreign students at U.S. colleges.

The government implemented a new system called the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, intended to provide government agents with quicker access to information about foreign students, and the FBI has worked closely with campus police and administrators to keep tabs on foreign students and watch for evidence of terrorism.

That heightened security contrasts with the image of many universities as liberal centers where free and sometimes provocative speech rules.

"A tradition we value, which is openness, has been challenged by 9-11," University of Idaho president Bob Hoover said recently.

The University of Idaho, about 90 miles south of Spokane, Wash., was rattled in late February when graduate student Sami Omar Al-Hussayen was arrested.

The Saudi national is jailed on charges of visa fraud and lying to federal agents. He has pleaded innocent.

Federal agents contend Al-Hussayen is tied to the Islamic Assembly of North America and helped operate Web sites for two radical Saudi sheiks, Salman Al-Awdah and Safar al-Hawali, who are believed to have direct contact with Osama bin Laden. The IANA says it is a nonprofit group formed to promote Islam; federal investigators allege it funneled money to activities supporting terrorism.

On Friday, an FBI source confirmed that a second man with ties to the University of Idaho and IANA had been arrested by federal agents in January as part of the widening investigation. That man, former Idaho student Bassem K. Khafagi, was arrested in New York and was taken to Michigan to face bank fraud charges, court documents show. The government says the Egyptian national was a founding member of the Islamic Assembly.

Investigators also identified a third former University of Idaho student, who now lives in Detroit, as an associate of IANA. He has not been charged and the FBI won't disclose his name.

The Spokesman-Review newspaper reported Friday that a former Washington State University student also is being held as a material witness in the investigation. Washington State University is about eight miles west of the University of Idaho.

Khafagi enrolled at the University of Idaho in 1986 and earned a master's degree in civil engineering in August 1988, school officials said. His master's thesis was on the design of pre-stressed girders, such as those used in high-rise buildings and bridges.

His student visa expired in July 2001 and authorities said he was living illegally in the United States at the time of his arrest.