LOS ANGELES, Nov 9: Nearly two months after the Sept 11 attacks on World Trade Centre and Pentagon, federal prosecutors are considering filing the first terrorism charges against at least one of those rounded up in a nationwide dragnet.

Officials think the move could encourage some of the most puzzling suspects to start talking.

Of all the 1,182 people rounded up by the FBI, three men of particular interest — who refuse to say much of anything in custody — may now face new federal charges.

At first, investigators thought Zacarias Moussaoui might have planned to join the four suspected hijackers on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.

But senior officials tell newsmen they have found no evidence of that, not even a single ATM receipt or phone call directly connecting him to any of the attacks. Moussaoui, who was arrested in Minnesota, was actually picked up a month before the hijackings on immigration charges, after he offered to pay thousands in cash for Jet simulation lessons.

Among Moussaoui’s possessions were crop-duster manuals, heightening the FBI’s suspicion.

Investigators have discovered that he made at least one phone call to Germany, to a roommate of alleged hijacker Mohammed Atta; that he received two money wire transfers from Germany in August; and that he once lived with one of the men recently accused of planning to bomb the US Embassy in Paris.

Prosecutors now say they may charge Moussaoui with seditious conspiracy — planning violence against the US. It’s the same law that was used to convict a New York sheikh of planning terrorist acts, including the 1993 bombing of the WTC.

In another case, investigators say they still don’t know what to make of Mohammad Azmat and Ayub Ali Khan, who were arrested in Texas the day after the US attacks, on an Amtrak train, carrying box-cutter knives, a large amount of cash and falsified passports. They took the train after their cross-country flight from Newark, N.J., was grounded in St. Louis. Authorities are considering charging the two with credit card fraud.