As she gazed at the burning towers, she noticed a group of men kneeling on the roof
of a white van in her parking lot. Here"s her recollection: "They seemed to be
taking a movie. They were like happy, you know ... they didn"t look shocked to me.
I thought it was strange."
Maria jotted down the van"s registration and called the police. The FBI was alerted
and soon there was a statewide all points bulletin put out for the apprehension of
the van and its occupants. The cops traced the number, establishing that it
belonged to a company called Urban Moving.
Police Chief John Schmidig said: "We got an alert to be on the lookout for a white
Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration and writing on the side. Three
individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the impact. They said
three people were jumping up and down."
By 4pm on the afternoon of September 11, the van was spotted near New Jersey"s
Giants stadium. A squad car pulled it over and inside were five men in their 20s.
They were hustled out of the car with guns levelled at their heads and handcuffed.
In the car was $4700 in cash, a couple of foreign passports and a pair of box
cutters " the concealed Stanley Knife-type blades used by the 19 hijackers who"d
flown jetliners into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon just hours before. There
were also fresh pictures of the men standing with the smouldering wreckage of the
Twin Towers in the background. One image showed a hand flicking a lighter in front
of the devastated buildings, like a fan at a pop concert. The driver of the van
then told the arresting officers: "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your
problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem."
His name was Sivan Kurzberg. The other four passengers were Kurzberg"s brother
Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari. The men were dragged off to
prison and transferred out of the custody of the FBI"s Criminal Division and into
the hands of their Foreign Counterintelligence Section " the bureau"s antiespionage
squad.
A warrant was issued for a search of the Urban Moving premises in Weehawken in New
Jersey. Boxes of papers and computers were removed. The FBI questioned the firm"s
Israeli owner, Dominik Otto Suter, but when agents returned to re-interview him a
few days later, he was gone. An employee of Urban Moving said his co-workers had
laughed about the Manhattan attacks the day they happened. "I was in tears," the
man said. "These guys were joking and that bothered me. These guys were like, "Now
America knows what we go through.""
Vince Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counter-terrorism with the CIA,
says the red flag went up among investigators when it was discovered that some of
the Israelis" names were found in a search of the national intelligence database.
Cannistraro says many in the US intelligence community believed that some of the
Israelis were working for Mossad and there was speculation over whether Urban
Moving had been "set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence
operation against radical Islamists".
This makes it clear that there was no suggestion whatsoever from within American
intelligence that the Israelis were colluding with the 9/11 hijackers " simply that
the possibility remains that they knew the attacks were going to happen, but
effectively did nothing to help stop them.
After the owner vanished, the offices of Urban Moving looked as if they"d been
closed down in a big hurry. Mobile phones were littered about, the office phones
were still connected and the property of at least a dozen clients were stacked up
in the warehouse. The owner had cleared out his family home in New Jersey and
returned to Israel.
Israel Announces Plans for 1,400 New West Bank Homes
