Somali held in connection with US attacks

A Somali US citizen has been detained without bail in Washington after his name and phone number appeared on a Washington road map found in a car registered to a man identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers who commandeered the American Airlines flight which crashed into the Pentagon. Mohammed Abdi of Virginia was described by prosecutors as an essential witness who "may be more", Associated Press (AP) said on Wednesday. Abdi's lawyer insisted that the former airline food worker had no connection to the 11 September terrorist attacks in the US.

Abdi was arrested on forgery charges unrelated to the attacks. FBI agent Kevin Ashby testified that when Abdi was arrested he had a piece of newspaper containing an article about Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who was convicted of conspiring to bomb the Los Angeles airport as part of a millennium terror plot, AP said. Investigators said the name "Mohumed" and a phone number registered to Abdi, a security guard and naturalised US citizen from Somalia, were written on the map found inside the car. Ashby said Abdi "could offer no explanation" of how his name and phone number turned up on the map.

The judge acknowledged that the charges against Abdi were ordinary, but said the connections to the attacks, even if tenuous, required him to err on the side of caution in denying bail.