WASHINGTON, March 20: Two Sept 11 hijackers studied at a Florida flight school long before their student visas were approved, the head of the US immigration service said on Tuesday, in an admission of problems at the agency.

James Ziglar, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, told reporters, “I would have to say it is an understatement that INS’s procedures ... were clearly not the most efficient and certainly not the most logical.”

Ziglar has been under fire since last week, when the INS informed the flight school the student visas had finally been approved. But he added in a speech at the National Press Club, “This problem has been fixed and it was being fixed March 11 when this showed up.”

On that day, exactly six months after the Sept. 11 attacks in USA, the Florida flight school where Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were trained, received notification from the INS that their student visas had been approved.

Atta and Al-Shehhi trained at Huffman Aviation International in Venice, Florida, and are believed to have piloted the two planes that hit New York’s World Trade Center. The two managed to study at the flight school long before their student visas were approved, Ziglar said, noting this was a common occurrence for foreign students because of the long processing time to change a visitor’s visa to a student one.

WITHOUT CHECKS: “Persons in the United States on visitors’ visas have been allowed in the past to begin school before their applications to change to student status have been approved,” Ziglar said.