A 25-year-old Palestinian-American chemical engineer arrested in the World Trade Center bombing was denied bail Friday after a judge ruled he could contact others who may have been involved.
Also Friday, German police agreed to help U.S. investigators follow a trail of money that was transferred from Duesseldorf to a New Jersey bank account shared by two suspects in the World Trade Center bombing.At a court hearing in Newark, N.J., U.S. Magistrate Dennis Cavanaugh said releasing Nidal A. Ayyad on bail would pose a danger because Ayyad could communicate with others who may have been involved but not yet arrested.
Although the FBI thinks the money from Germany financed the attack, the original source of the funds and the motive for the bombing itself remain unclear. But investigators said they were making progress.
"We are in the right arena. We are in the right section. We've come down the right aisle and are in the right row," said James Esposito, head of the FBI's office in Newark. "And now we have to finish identifying who sat in that row."
A spokesman for the German federal police, Thomas Rindsfuesser, said investigators would ask the Westdeutsche Genossenschafts Zentralbank in Duesseldorf about the transfer.
Henning Rautenberg, a bank spokesman, said $2,420.87 was transferred from his institution to a bank account in New Jersey held by the bombing suspects, Mohammed Salameh and Ayyad.
Rautenberg said his bank wired the money at the request of one of 500 member banks that belong to a cooperative banking system. Citing bank secrecy laws, he declined to identify the member bank or say who provided the money.
Rautenberg said the bank makes more than a million transfers a day and that the amount transferred to New Jersey "is not something that is out of the ordinary or that would raise any attention."