WASHINGTON, 18 July 2004 — The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents have begun interviewing Muslims and Arab-Americans in the United States in a bid to prevent terrorist attacks ahead of the Nov. 2 presidential election, The Washington Post reported yesterday.

An FBI official told the Post on condition of anonymity that a few dozen Muslim students, community leaders and businesspeople had already consented to be interviewed, stressing the interview subjects were not suspects.

Several people interviewed in California and Arizona have been asked if they knew people who were recently in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, near the Afghan border, an area believed to be a haven for Al-Qaeda operatives.

The agents also asked about the Abu Nour Mosque and school in Syria, which they suggested was popular among American converts to Islam, the Post said. “We were told by the FBI agents that they’re concerned there could be a coming threat from people who are recent converts to Islam,” Stacy Tolchin, a lawyer from San Francisco who accompanied a Turkish Kurdish immigrant to an interview this week, told the Post.

Yaser Alamoodi, a Yemeni national studying at the University of Arizona, said his FBI interviewer was friendly and polite while asking whether he knew anyone who had recently come back from Pakistan, harbored strong hostility toward Americans or expressed interest in a government agency or building.

“The questions were just ridiculous,” 27-year-old Alamoodi told the Post. “I said, ‘You guys really think you’re going to get anywhere with these kind of questions’?” He said he was surprised that the agents chose him for an interview: “I don’t go to the mosque that often,” he said. “Unless they have free food.”

The FBI warned on Friday that Al-Qaeda may be recruiting non-Arabs less likely to attract the notice of security personnel to carry out attacks inside the United States.

The terror network especially seeks operatives who have US citizenship or legal residency status, the FBI’s counterterrorism division said in its weekly bulletin to 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide.

“Finding operatives with US status would greatly facilitate Al-Qaeda’s ability to carry out an attack within the United States,” said the bulletin, obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

The new warning comes amid a continuous stream of intelligence indicating that Al-Qaeda is determined to strike the United States in the summer or fall. US officials have said the terror network blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks hopes to inflict mass casualties again and disrupt the US political process in this presidential election year.

The latest FBI bulletin again makes no mention of a possible time, place or method of attack. Security is expected to be especially tight at this summer’s political conventions, which begin July 26 with the Democratic Party’s gathering in Boston. The Republican convention is in late August in New York.

Using non-Arabs might make it easier for Al-Qaeda to circumvent security measures in Europe and the United States, the bulletin said. Of special concern are people with ties to Muslim extremist groups in North Africa and parts of Asia outside the Middle East.

Still, the FBI said, almost all Al-Qaeda operatives in the past have traveled at least once to South Asia, particularly Afghanistan and Pakistan, for “consultation and training.” Afghanistan was the site of Al-Qaeda terror training camps before the US invasion of that country in 2001 and Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden is believed to be hiding out in remote regions of Pakistan, where the terror network has many sympathizers.

The Sept. 11 commission’s report, due out Thursday, says Iran may have facilitated the 2001 attacks on the United States by providing eight to 10 Al-Qaeda hijackers with safe passage to and from training camps in Afghanistan, US media reports said yesterday. Time and Newsweek, in similar reports quoting congressional, commission and government sources, said Iran relaxed border controls and provided “clean” passports for the so-called “muscle hijackers” to transit Iran to and from Osama Bin Laden’s camps between October 2000 and February 2001.