Second key witness arrested

United States authorities have arrested a second man wanted as a "material witness" in relation to last week's terrorist attacks.

He was arrested in Jersey City, across the Hudson River from New York.

He has not been identified, but the FBI described him as being of "Middle Eastern origin".

It believed that he might have useful information on the hijacking of aircraft used in the terror attacks.

Arrested on Saturday, he was one of 25 people questioned by the FBI while they were in the custody of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service on possible immigration violations.

Jersey City police director James Carter would not give the man's name, age or nationality.

The authorities' first arrest in the worldwide hunt for those involved in the terror attacks was made on Friday.

Described as Middle Eastern, the man had initially been detained at John F. Kennedy International Airport with a fake pilot's licence.

He was arrested because authorities felt he had information relevant to the investigation and that he was likely to abscond. The warrant identified the suspect as a witness.

In another development, two men detained at an Amtrak station in Fort Worth, Texas, were interviewed by FBI agents, taken into custody and then flown to New York.

They were taken off an Amtrak train during a routine drug search. Although no drugs were found, the men had box-cutting knives and also carried about $US5000 ($11,800) in cash, said one official.

Hijackers in last week's hijackings used knives and box-cutters to take control of the airliners.

The official said that the men taken off the train had been on a flight from Newark to San Antonio on the same day that the hijackers commandeered the four airliners and crashed three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The flight was diverted to St Louis, where the men took an Amtrak train heading for San Antonio, an FBI spokeswoman said.

The Tarrant County Sheriff's Office in Texas said the men were Ayub Ali Khan, aged 51, and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, 47. The authorities said the men were from India.

Investigators have identified 19 men they say carried out the attacks.

FBI agents fanned out across the country interviewing people about the 19 hijackers and gave local police departments and federal law enforcement agencies a list of 100 people whom agents wanted to question about the attacks.

Hundreds of subpoenas have been issued in the search for those who helped the hijackers.

More than 30 search warrants have been executed and investigators have seized computers and documents.

The FBI said most of the suspects, all presumed dead, had addresses in the United States and some of them were qualified pilots.

Since last week's attacks, the FBI has been alerted to more than 36,000 potential leads and has interviewed hundreds of people.

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