9/11 curtain-raiser to more assaults, says US

The September 11 attacks may have been planned as the first of three terrorist strikes in the US, each bigger and more devastating than the ...

The September 11 attacks may have been planned as the first of three terrorist strikes in the US, each bigger and more devastating than the last, US officials said, citing interviews with captured Al-Qaeda operatives.

The information comes from several sources, including detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But they stressed that it has not been corroborated and the sources may be unreliable or deceptive. ‘‘We’ve heard it from more than one source,’’ said a US official. ‘‘The national security (investigators), of course, are thinking chemical, biological and nuclear (attacks)…It’s pretty chilling stuff, but we don’t have all the information.’’

Authorities expressed caution about recent disclosures by some Al-Qaeda prisoners warning of a trio of major terrorist attacks. Since days after the attacks, authorities said they have been concerned about a possible ‘‘second wave’’ of attacks. The indications that there might be at least two other such attacks in the works is being investigated, authorities said. ‘‘It is serious but the attitude is, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ ’’ said an official.

‘‘If there was anything of a huge scale, bigger than Sept. 11 in the pipeline, we think we would have been given a clearer picture, that somebody would have said something.’’ ‘‘You can’t dismiss it out of hand.’’ ‘‘But it would be wrong to attach too much significance to comments along those lines because they are not corroborated.’’ (LATWP)