WASHINGTON, May 9: The US Federal Bureau of Investigation largely ignored an appeal from one of its field offices to investigate suspicious pilot training by Middle Eastern men weeks before the September 11 attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged.

The damaging admission came as the beleaguered agency scrambled to fight back allegations that it might have missed telltale signs of the coming tragedy.

“That was received at headquarters,” Mueller said of the appeal as he testified Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “It was not acted on by Sept 11.”

The episode became the focus of congressional scrutiny over the weekend, when FBI officials acknowledged that two months before the attacks an FBI office in the US state of Arizona tried and failed to organize a nationwide probe of suspicious foreign students attending US flight schools.

Some of the 19 Islamist militants blamed for the attack with four hijacked airliners studied flying in the United States.

According to an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity, on July 2001, the bureau’s office in Phoenix sent a memorandum to Washington informing that a suspicious number of “people of interest” were enrolled in various aspects of civil aviation and pilot training in Arizona.

“FBI headquarters should discuss this matter with other elements of the US intelligence community and ask the community for any information than supports Phoenix’s suspicion,” said the memo.

The federal agents in Phoenix wanted their bosses in the capital to compile a nationwide list of flight schools and instruct local FBI offices to closely monitor them.

They also asked headquarters to seek from the State Department visa information on some of the foreign students coming to the United States to study flying.

Mueller said the FBI should have paid more attention to the document. But he made clear the agency could not have thwarted the terrorist operation, even if it had.

“I should say in passing that even if we had followed those suggestions at that time, it would not, given what we know since September 11, have enabled us to prevent the attacks of September 11,” argued the FBI director.

He said plans for the assault on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon building here had been hatched overseas, beginning at least five years ago, in strictest confidence.

“In our investigation, we have not yet uncovered a single piece of paper — either here in the US or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere — that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot,” Mueller said.—AFP