'Al-Qa'ida link' to US embassy scam

American investigators are hunting 29 illegal immigrants from the Middle East who entered the country on false documents provided by an employee at a US embassy.

In all, 71 people are known to have used fraudulent papers from the embassy in Qatar – two of them men who shared rooms with some of the 11 September hijackers. Those two are still at large.

Operation Eagle Strike was launched in January this year to investigate the scheme. So far, 31 people who received false visas have been arrested. A State Department official who allegedly sold the documents is currently under 24-hour surveillance.

A spokesman for the State Department said: "Thirty-one people have been taken into custody, 29 are actively being sought, six persons have departed the United States." He added that the remaining five visas went to spouses and children.

The FBI and the State Department are assessing whether any of those who received a visa is a terrorist or whether they all simply wanted to pay their way into America. While officials say they cannot yet make a link with terrorism, investigators are checking possible connections to al-Qa'ida.

Officials told the Los Angeles Times they were particularly concerned to trace two men, Rasmi Subhi Salah al-Shannaq and Ahmed Ahmad, who lived in northern Virginia, near Washington, with two of the 11 September hijackers.

Investigators are trying to determine whether a third man who obtained an illegal visa was also a roommate of Hani Hanjour, one of the suspected plot leaders, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, both of whom were on American Airlines flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.

The inquiry was launched after a tip was received that an employee in the embassy in Qatar was granting fraudulent visas and charging between $10,000 and $20,000. Locally retained and American employees at the embassy are under investigation but the main focus is on the State Department employee currently under 24-hour surveillance.