This story doesn’t say how Wolfgang Bohringer has been linked to Atta. “Report: FBI raises terror alarm about South Pacific flying school,” from The Associated Press, :
CANBERRA, Australia: U.S. authorities have raised an alarm over a plan by a German citizen “” linked to the Sept. 11 terror attacks “” to build a flying school in a remote South Pacific island nation, a news report said Wednesday.
Wolfgang Bohringer has been linked to Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker in the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. The German arrived by yacht in Kiribati a year ago with plans to build a flying school, but has since left the far-flung archipelago, Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio reported.
The island where the school was planned was among the country’s closest to the U.S. island state of Hawaii, the report said.
Kiribati’s President Anote Tong said the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation had warned him that it was suspicious of Bohringer, the ABC said.
Tong said the FBI also warned him that small countries like Kiribati, whose 94,000 people live on 33 atolls scattered 4,000 kilometers (1,400 miles) along the equator, could be vulnerable to terrorists, the ABC reported.
“I think it demonstrates how vulnerable small countries can be,” Tong told the ABC.
“We confess we don’t have the resources to be able to monitor everything and everybody that goes through our system, but it’s made us a lot more alert, I think,” he said.