Federal investigators on Saturday were holding an unnamed man as a "material witness" in this week's terrorist attacks, the first person to be detained in a massive probe initiated by US authorities.
New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik told reporters late Friday that the unidentified man had been detained as a material witness in the World Trade Center attack.
Meanwhile, NBC television reported early Saturday that two other men who had been detained and were on their way to New York for questioning, as the biggest-ever US criminal investigation continued to unfold.
The pair were being transported to New York for interviews with FBI agents in connection with the terror attacks, NBC reported.
The individual described as a material witness was detained in New York late Friday. While not necessarily a suspect, a material witness is believed to know information authorities may find relevant to a criminal investigation, and often is considered a flight risk.
The man's detention follows the terrorist attacks Tuesday that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and a section of the Pentagon, just outside Washington. Another hijacked plane crashed in the state of Pennsylvania.
Earlier Friday, US investigators identified 19 men they say carried out unprecedented terrorist strikes using hijacked airliners as weapons, as the hunt intensified for those who planned and financed the carnage.
Most of the suspects, all presumed dead, had addresses in the United States and a number of them were qualified pilots, according to the FBI. Another list of 52 names of alleged associates in the United States has been circulated to airlines.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said a third list, with 100 names, had been issued to law enforcement agencies throughout the United States, including 18,000 police departments.
"They may have information that could be helpful," he said at a news conference.
Investigators late Friday found the second of two flight recorders of hijacked United Airlines flight 93 which crashed in southwestern Pennsylvania, killing all 45 aboard, the FBI announced.
Authorities had hoped key clues would emerge from flight data and voice recorders recovered from the wreckage of another airliner which crashed into the Pentagon, but the Washington Times reported late Friday that the voice recorder was so badly damaged no information could be retrieved.
And though both flight recorders have now been retrieved from the crash site of fourth plane in Pennsylvania, no information has yet been retrieved from those recorders, one of which was badly damaged.
Law enforcement sources told US media a number of those named on the list were known to them as having ties to Osama bin Laden, the suspected terrorist mastermind of the kamikaze air attacks.
These groups, specifically Islamic Jihad and fundamentalists in Algeria, are loosely affiliated to bin Laden's international network of militants, al-Qaeda, according to the reports.
Elsewhere, European law enforcement authorities stepped up their hunt for suspects and Swiss investigators are searching for evidence that some suspects may have passed through Switzerland.
Two of the presumed hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, have been linked by German authorities to Hamburg, Germany.
German authorities say two of the men named by the FBI as hijackers were one-time Hamburg residents. They are Mohamed Atta, aboard American Airlines flight 11, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, on United Airlines flight 175 -- the two planes that crashed into the World Trade Center.
Meanwhile, Belgian prosecutors arrested a man described by police in Brussels as a Muslim of North African origin belonging to a "radical Islamic movement" on suspicion of attempted attacks on US interests in Europe -- WASHINGTON (AFP)
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