working with school and other public officials to spot terrorist suspects.

“We work constantly with technology companies, education officials and others including flight school instructors to identify suspicious people and their activities,” FBI agent Donald Wood told the Chronicle.

Wood would not say if they have had any such activity in Lexington County and the Midlands as that might compromise their ongoing investigations.

Wood said flight school trainers are important because that was the method the 9-11 terrorists used to learn how to hijack 4 jet airliners and crash 3 of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

A recent example of FBI success was the arrest and conviction of Naif Abdulaziz Alfallaj, 35, of Saudi Arabia. He was sentenced to 151 months (12.5 years) for lying to the FBI about attending an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

“The US Government identified the defendant after finding his fingerprints on an application to join al Qaeda that the US military had gathered from the battlefields of Afghanistan,” said Assistant Attorney General John Demers of the National Security Division.

“We were able to match those fingerprints with fingerprints taken for his US visa application and to determine that he had made false statements in that application to conceal his attendance at an al Qaeda training camp in 2000.”