Terror warnings ignored

last updated 8 January 2015

Alexandria, Va.

Three weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, an FBI agent warned superiors that Zacharias Moussaoui was involved in a plot to hijack a commercial jet using small knives, the agent testified this week. Special Agent Harry Samit, testifying in a trial that will determine whether Moussaoui will be imprisoned for life or put to death, said he detailed his concerns in more than 70 pages of memos to FBI headquarters. But officials in Washington declined Samit’s repeated requests for permission to search Moussaoui’s apartment. He later confessed to being an al Qaida operative. “God help us all if the next terrorist incident involves this kind of plan,” an investigator in Samit’s office wrote, in a memo dated Sept. 10, 2001.