PORTLAND – Police detectives are preparing to question 22 Middle Eastern men with licenses to transport hazardous materials, as requested by the U.S. Justice Department.

The men’s names appear on a list the FBI provided to local police last month. The precise criteria used to generate the list is unclear.

The Department of Justice wants authorities to question roughly 5,000 foreigners about any information they may have that could help the nation’s effort to fight terrorism.

Hazardous waste haulers are included because a future terrorist attack could involve a trailer load of the material they haul. Portland police detectives are making contact with 20 men in Portland and one each in South Portland and Gorham.

None of them has any significant criminal background or appears connected to any terrorist organization, Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood said Tuesday.

“This is all as a result of ‘intelligence’ that the next attack could be a tractor trailer full of explosives,” said Chitwood, who met with FBI officials two weeks ago about improving cooperation between the agencies.

Since Sept. 11, many people have been charged with fraudulently obtaining commercial driver’s licenses that included permission to transport hazardous materials. A man suspected of being an associate of the hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon had a hazardous materials transportation license.

In another development, the family of a New York woman who died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center has informed Portland officials that the city could be named in a future wrongful death suit.

A notice of claim says a lawyer representing the estate of Lorraine Antigua, a 32-year-old mother of two from Brooklyn who worked on the 104th floor, was preserving a right to sue Portland under Maine’s tort claims law. An actual lawsuit would have to be filed within two years.

Since the city is responsible for some airport security, it could be considered liable if facts show lax security enabled two of the 19 hijackers to board an airplane in Portland, said city transportation director Jeffrey Monroe.

Many of those seeking claims stemming from the attacks are being urged by their lawyers to seek payments from a special fund created by Congress just for that purpose, said Richard Campbell, a Boston attorney who is a member of the American Bar Association’s task force on terrorism.

Washington attorney Kenneth Feinberg is in charge of the fund and will begin meetings next week to set up the system for reviewing claims and making payments.

The basic structure of the program is spelled out in a law that was part of the airline bailout package passed by Congress and signed by President Bush two weeks after the attacks.