WASHINGTON, July 17: FBI agents are interrogating Muslim and Arab Americans across the United States, asking them if they knew anyone who has recently visited Pakistan or Syria.
The campaign was aimed at gleaning information that could prevent a major terrorist attack during this election year, the agency said.
Officials of the regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which include police officers, accompany FBI agents during these interviews.
These interviews have panicked the already nervous Muslim and Arab communities in the US because similar interviews in the past led to the deportation of thousands of immigrants.
US Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and the US Department of Homeland Security recently issued warnings regarding a possible large-scale Al Qaeda attack in the US.
US intelligence officials have identified Waziristan and Syria's Abu Nour Madressah as the two places where some of the terrorists might have trained.
Reports about FBI's interviews were first circulated by Muslim advocacy groups early last week but they did not get much attention until Saturday when the Washington Post ran a front-page story about the interviews.
The Post said that the FBI had already interviewed dozens of community leaders, students and businesspeople and "the effort is expected to expand significantly in the next week or so."
The new round of questioning was far more focussed than an earlier programme of voluntary interviews with men from Arab and Muslim countries after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, the report said.
An FBI official told Post that this time the agency was not contacting general population but only interviewing those who have been identified "by intelligence or investigative information."
The officer also said that the questioning did not signify that the people themselves were under investigation.
Stacy Tolchin, a San Francisco lawyer, who accompanied a Turkish immigrant to an interview this week, told the Post that the FBI agents were looking for some recent converts to Islam while a Washington-based Muslim lawyer, Asim Ghafoor, was questioned about various Muslim organizations and charities.
In St Louis, a graduate student of Iranian descent was asked about Iranian groups based in the Middle East and in the US and whether he knew people who had been in contact with the Iranian Mission to the United Nations.
Yaser Alamoodi, a student at the Arizona State University, was asked whether he knew anyone who had recently returned from Pakistan, anyone who had shown interest in a government building or agency or anyone who had shown extreme hostility toward Americans.
Others were also asked broad questions, such as their opinion of the US invasion of Iraq or of the Syrian government.
Deedra Abboud, executive director of the Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told the Post within two days, she received 10 calls from people "freaking out because the FBI was contacting them."
She said that the FBI agents went out of their way to be low- key but that Muslims were fearful when they got the calls, worried that they were under investigation themselves.
