FBI asks: Who are the men in this photo from ferry?

The FBI wants to identify two men who reportedly rode as many as six different ferry routes in recent weeks — snapping photos of doorways and going to areas of the boats where passengers don't normally go — and is asking the public to help.

In a rare move, the federal agency has released photographs of the men taken by a ferry employee.

The FBI hopes to determine whether the men are innocent passengers or possible terrorists.

"They seemed very interested in the operation of the boat," said David Gomez, the assistant special agent in charge of the agency's Seattle office.

"They were taking photographs of doors, not seabirds," said U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Richard Hartley in Seattle.

Gomez said employees and passengers reported the incidents over several weeks this summer. In at least one instance, they asked questions about ferry operations, Gomez said. It wasn't until analysts looked through the reports that a pattern was seen, he said. Since then, the FBI has concluded "four to six" of the incidents were related and involved the same two men.

Several other similar incidents were reported, but analysts could not conclude they involved the same men.

One ferry employee was so suspicious that he snapped photographs of the two standing at the rail of a ferry. The FBI would not say exactly when the photos were taken or which boat they were taken on.

Gomez said investigators conducted follow-up interviews with witnesses, including showing them photos.

"We have enough investigative confirmation to make us believe the incidents are related," Gomez said. The men have not been seen in several weeks.

FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs said the FBI has received dozens of tips as a result of releasing the photos. So far, the men remain unidentified.

"We are able to resolve the great majority of reports of suspicious activities on the ferries," Gomez said. "We have not been able to do that here." The decision to release the photographs publicly was vetted with bureau officials in Washington, D.C., and demonstrates just how serious the potential threat is being taken, he said.

The sightings so concerned area law-enforcement officials that the Washington State Patrol, the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration accelerated plans to work together more regularly, said Bob Calkins, a state patrol spokesman. The three agencies and the FBI have all been looking for the men.

The Seattle Times reported on Aug. 4 that security had been increased due to suspicious riders on ferries. When the photos were released late Monday afternoon, The Times refrained from publishing them in print or online. "We had little more information than we'd reported earlier in the month, and we wanted to better understand the circumstances surrounding the investigation and the photographs," said Suki Dardarian, managing editor of news coverage and enterprise.

"Further reporting helped us more effectively weigh the potential value — and harm — of publishing the photos. After some deliberation, we decided to publish the photographs, along with as much context as we could bring to the story."

On Tuesday, readers of the news alert posted on a variety of Internet sites weighed in on the decision to publish or not. Some suggested that distributing the photos was profiling on the part of law enforcement, while others thanked media outlets and the FBI for alerting them to possible threats to security.

The release of the photos enraged some in the Arab-American and Muslim communities, said Aziz Junejo, who hosts an Islamic talk show on television and writes a column about Islam for The Seattle Times.

He called the release "careless" and said he has been inundated with complaints that the FBI is profiling Arab-Americans. He said the photos appear to be of two Arab-American men.

"The people I'm hearing from are outraged and angry and paranoid," he said. "They're afraid to ride the ferries now."

Hisham Farajallah, the president of the Islamic Center of Washington and a board member at the Idriss Mosque in Northgate, said people are "scared."

"But we all want the same thing — that is the safety and security of our country," he said, noting that the Islamic community and law enforcement in Seattle have a good relationship.

Gomez said there is no specific threat to the ferry system and Hartley, the Coast Guard enforcement official, said maritime-security levels remain at their lowest.

Still, there has been a notable increase in visible security on some ferry runs in recent weeks, said WSF Executive Director Mike Anderson. "We have thrown some manpower at this," he said.

The Washington ferry system moves more than 26 million passengers and 11 million vehicles a year and is the largest ferry system in the country. Last year, it was singled out by the Department of Justice inspector general as one of the top two maritime terrorist targets in the country. The other is oil-tanker traffic along the Gulf Coast.

Ahmed Ressam, an al-Qaida-trained terrorist convicted of conspiring to set off a bomb at the Los Angeles International Airport during the Millennium celebration, was captured in December 1999 coming off a privately owned ferry in Port Angeles from Victoria, B.C. The trunk of his rental car was filled with bomb-making materials.

In June 2004, several Marine and Navy officers attending the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., conducted surveillance of the ferries as a class project and determined they were vulnerable to attack.

In the spring of 2004, the FBI conducted a threat assessment of the ferry system and concluded that terrorists were conducting "pre-operational planning" for an attack. The assessment was based on a review of 157 suspicious incidents over nearly three years. Analysts concluded that 19 of them were likely or extremely likely to have involved terrorist surveillance.

Gomez said the most recent incidents are similar to the 19, but that analysts have not been able to draw the same conclusions because of a lack of information.

Following the 2004 threat assessment, the Coast Guard required the State Patrol to increase the number of vehicles it screens, mostly through the use of explosive-sniffing dogs. Even so, the number of cars, trucks and vans screened going onto the boats remains a fraction of the total. Walk-on ferry passengers are not screened and do not undergo any security check.

Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com and Jennifer Sullivan: 206-464-8294 or jensullivan@seattletimes.com