WASHINGTON (AFP) - As the US Justice Department flexed its newly-broad powers of detention for immigrant criminal suspects, FBI agents took three men of Arab extraction in Detroit, Michigan, into federal custody on charges relating to last week's deadly terrorist attacks.

FBI spokesman Hank Glaspie said Ahmed Hannan, 33, Karim Koubriti, 23, and Farouk Ali-Halmoud, 21, were being held at an undisclosed location "for possession of false documents," including identification papers and airport passes. Also found in the Detroit house were diagrams of that city's international airport and information about a US military base in Turkey.

The three were taken into custody when Federal Bureau of Investigation agents carried out a warrant to search the house, listed as the last known residence of Habil Al-Marabh, wanted for questioning in the hijackings. The three men said they did not know Al-Marabh.

The arrests are among the first successes in the widening probe, which has seen 75 people detained on immigration violations, as well as two suspected as material witnesses. Two other warrants for material witnesses have been executed.

Fake pilot's license

Law enforcement is also investigating a man arrested in Canada, who has since been transported to the United States, who carried Palestinian Authority travel documents and photographs of himself dressed in a flight jacket in front of a false World Trade Center backdrop.

The FBI is also interrogating a man who breached security at New York's Kennedy airport last Thursday with a fake pilot's license in his sock.

At the order of Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Immigration and Naturalization Service revised current regulations governing the detention of immigrants.

Previously, the INS had just 24 hours to decide whether to charge an immigrant taken into custody; now, the agency has 48 hours or "additional reasonable time, if necessary," Ashcroft told reporters Tuesday.

Ashcroft said the rules would apply to the 75 people already in INS custody on immigration violations, who "may also have information related to this investigation."

Among those held is Habib Zacarias Moussaoui, of French or Algerian nationality, who was detained in Minnesota on Aug 17 for illegally entering the United States.

Training courses

Moussaoui had tried unsuccessfully to complete pilot training courses, including one in Oklahoma, where he appeared more concerned with learning how to steer a plane than being taught how to land.

Since the attacks by four hijacked airplanes on targets of US financial and military might, the FBI has asked France for information about Moussaoui, who had traveled several times to Afghanistan - where prime suspect Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding.

Ashcroft also said on Tuesday that investigators were reviewing whether the four hijacked airplanes were the only ones planned to hit US targets.

"We are looking at the possibility that there may have been more than four planes targeted for hijacking, but we are not able at this time to confirm that," he said.

Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, detained in Texas and transported to New York when they were found carrying 5,000 dollars in cash and box cutters similar to those used in the hijackings, are suspected to have been foiled in an effort to hijack a fifth aircraft.

Meeting with Iraqi official

As federal investigators sifted through the more than 96,000 leads they have received, they expanded a list of people wanted for questioning to nearly 200. More than 18,000 local and state law enforcement officials have received the list of those wanted for questioning, the FBI said.

Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency reviewed reports that one of those suspected in the plot had a meeting with an Iraqi intelligence official.

"There is an indication that such a meeting occurred earlier this year in Europe," A US government source told AFP .

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday while he would not finger any one country, "we have a lot of evidence that a number of countries were harboring terrorists."

The hijacker in question is Mohammed Atta, who is believed to have been aboard the American Airlines plane that decimated the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. A second plane crashed into the south tower just 20 minutes later, burying more than 5,600, most of whom are still missing.

The CIA stressed it was not certain the meeting "had anything to do with Tuesday's events," the source said.

Learning how to fly large planes

Federal prosecutors have empanelled a grand jury in White Planes, New York, to make it easier to subpoena people and documents, law enforcement sources have indicated, and in Texas, FBI agents raided a flight school in Arlington seeking information about Khan, The Dallas Morning News reported.

Also, in San Diego, FBI agents have learned that three of those suspected in the Sept 11 attacks were students at an area flight school.

Khaled al-Midhar, Nawaq al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour, who is believed to have been responsible for the crash at the Pentagon that killed 189 people, wanted to learn how to fly large planes, Montgomery airport aviation club president Fred Sorbi told AFP .

"One day I saw one of them overflighing Manhathan in the virtual computer program," he said. "It has been terrible to learn that someone I saw myself was plotting a terrorist act."

A fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, thwarted in its efforts to hit another Washington target in what has become the worst-ever terrorist attack on US soil.