FBI Heads To Yemen
The FBI assembled a team of veteran Middle East terrorism investigators Thursday to send to Yemen to investigate the explosion that killed U.S. sailors aboard the USS Cole in a port there.
The first agents dispatched came from the nearest FBI outpost—the FBI legal attache's office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The bureau expected that later Thursday a larger group of investigators, explosive experts and an evidence response team would leave from Andrews Air Force Base, Md., for Yemen.
"We will do everything we can to find out what caused this tragedy," Attorney General Janet Reno told her weekly news conference.
The first wave of agents would include 20 from the Washington field office, which has one of the bureau's five Rapid Deployment Teams and has jurisdiction for investigating attacks on Americans in the Middle East.
An unknown number of experts also were being drawn from the FBI Laboratory and its Critical Incident Response Group from Quantico, Va.
The Washington field office opened a criminal investigation of an overseas homicide of Americans because at least four U.S. sailors on the Cole were killed, according to a federal law enforcement official, who requested anonymity.
As with all overseas homicides under suspicious circumstances, the case was assigned to an international terrorism squad.
Almost all the agents assigned to go to Yemen have been to the Middle East before to investigate one or both of two previous terrorist attacks: the 1996 truck bomb attack that killed 19 U.S. airmen at the Khobar Towers apartments in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people including 12 Americans.
Their on-scene commander will be Art Eberhart, a 25-year bureau veteran who is special agent in charge for administration at the FBI's Washington field office.
Last year, while he was still with the Critical Incident Response Group, Eberhart headed FBI teams that twice visited Kosovo to unearth evidence of war crimes against civilians.
Agents on the FBI rapid deployment evidence response teams all keep a prepacked "go bag" for just this kind of emergency assignment. These large duffel bags carry clothing, boots, hats, gloves, evidence bags, cotton swabs and fingerprint kits for evidence gathering.
The explosives experts among them carry field kits to do preliminary tests to determine what chemicals are in any explosive residues that are found.
FBI agents cannot conduct investigations abroad unless invited to do so by the government of the country where the crimes occurred. How much work these agents are allowed to do has varied from country to country.
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN