Ramzi Yusef, architect of first World Trade Center bombing, carried plans for airliner suicide crashes.

Ramzi Ahmed Yusef has long been behind bars. But he might provide the key for federal investigators examining the suicide attacks in New York and Washington.

U.S. officials said the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon bear the imprint of Yusef, the 41-year-old Pakistani who was convicted for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Yusef was arrested and found with plans for a coordinated series of hijackings and suicide crashes of several U.S. commercial airliners.

The plan was never carried out, the officials said, because of the limitations of the poorly-trained squad. Most of Yusef's plans, including the 1993 World Trade Center attack, failed to succeed.

"What we saw was the completion of Yusef's plans," an official said. "The resemblance is too strong to ignore."

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said each of the hijacked planes were commandeered by three to six attackers. Several of the attackers were pilots trained in the United States, Ashcroft said.

Federal investigation sources said one of the suspects is Mohammed Ata. Ata was identified as a Palestinian wanted for a 1996 bus bombing in Israel.

One prospect is that....

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