Of the four hijacker pilots, Jarrah was the most westernized, coming from a Lebanese secular background and Christian schooling before moving to Germany for university studies. "[98], In the months following the September 11 attacks, officials at the Czech Interior Ministry asserted that Atta made a trip to Prague on April 8, 2001, to meet with an Iraqi intelligence agent named Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. It had been overlooked that there would still be a security screen to pass in Boston because of this distinct detail of the terminal's arrangement. The reservation was not used and canceled on August 9 with the reason "Family Medical Emergency". But none of them were so flagged. Evidently, he tried to deliver a message instructing the passengers and crew to stay put over the cabin's PA system, but pressed the wrong switch and thereby tipped off ATC that the flight had been hijacked. About a minute later, he turned the plane southbound, on a course pointed in the direction of New York City. There, Mr. Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, another man the F.B.I. It's hard to tell.". When they later returned to Huffman, Mr. Pursell said, they were reprimanded. [38] Even before bin al-Shibh had arrived, Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah were sent to the House of Ghamdi near bin Laden's home in Kandahar, where he was waiting to meet them. One theory suggests that Mohamed Atta and the other pilots who led the hijacking teams were here planning the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. A secret police intelligence report . ", The other possibility is that Atta went to Portland for a final meeting with an unknown supporter. Atta had lived in Germany for approximately five years and also had a "strong record as a student". Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta (/t/ AT-ah; Arabic: [mmmd elmi wd essj.jed t]; September 1, 1968 September 11, 2001) was an Egyptian hijacker and the ringleader of the September 11 attacks in 2001 in which four United States airliners were commandeered with the intention of destroying specific civilian, military, and governmental targets. ''They said I'd hear back from them, which I never did.''. They checked out the next morning, and spent the next few days at an unknown location in Tarragona. Report Suggest Cover-Up of 9/11 Findings", "Father Denies 'Gentle Son' Could Hijack Any Jetliner", "Father insists alleged leader of attack on WTC is still alive", "He Never Even Had a Kite" Mohamed Atta's father talks about his son, the alleged hijacker, " 11 ", New video shows 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta, Ziad Jarrah at Al-Qaida meeting., Interviews with those who interacted with Atta prior to 9/11, October 2001 interview with Dittmar Machule, "MUGSHOTS: Mohammed Atta - Soldier of Terror", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mohamed_Atta&oldid=1140797922, Four Corners, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast November 12, 2001, Documentary series from Court TV (now TruTV), This page was last edited on 21 February 2023, at 21:12. He asked about the Pentagon and the White House. [1][2][3][4][5] Having just turned 33 at the time of the attacks, he was the oldest of the 19 hijackers who took part in the mission. While in South Portland, they were seen making two ATM withdrawals and stopping at Wal-Mart. "[111], In 2021, on the 20th anniversary of the attacks, Atta's mother was interviewed by a Spanish newspaper. American Airlines Flight 11 was hijacked by five al Qaeda terrorists led by Mohamed Atta and was deliberately crashed into the North Tower (on the right) of the World Trade Center at 8:46am local . Atta also claimed different nationalities, sometimes Egyptian and other times telling people he was from the United Arab Emirates. The hour-long tape places him in Afghanistan at a decisive moment in the development of the conspiracy when he was given operational command. Atta said, he was to crash the plane. On Sept. 12, 2001, investigators combed over the field near Shanksville, Pa., where United Flight 93 crashed a day earlier. [15][17], Atta also got engaged to a woman lined up by his father and her family in Cairo, at late 1999, after coming back from Germany the same year. Unidentified sources from both Al-Qaeda and the United States confirmed The Times the video's authenticity. ''Tower seemed to have no trouble taxiing around it at a busy time,'' the handwritten report reads. Some, like the 9/11 plot's ringleader, Mohamed Atta, flew in from Florida, checking into a motel in Wayne for a few days and then leaving and then returning days . Had Atta or any of these men been on international watchlists, their names would have been flagged upon making a domestic reservation. Months later both he and Jarrah enrolled at flying schools in America. [66][67], Atta began flight training on July 6, 2000, and continued training nearly every day. The plane is piloted by plot leader Mohamed Atta. Atta's bags were later recovered in Logan International Airport, and they contained airline uniforms, flight manuals, and other items. [60][61], On June 6, 2002, ABC's World News Tonight broadcast an interview with Johnelle Bryant, former loan officer at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in south Florida, who told about her encounter with Mohamed Atta. Just after 9:03 a.m., United 175 crashed into the World Trade Center's South Tower. Tuohey was the ticket agent at the Portland International Jetport who handed two of the terrorists - Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari - their boarding passes for an early morning flight to . Newsweek is reconstructing the road to 9/11 as it was constructed 20 years ago, day by day. On August 26, Saudi brothers Waleed and Wail al-Shehri also purchased tickets for the same flight. Another theory is that the 9/11 ringleader was concerned about a last-minute weather glitch or traffic jam in Boston. At 2:12 p.m. on August 25, Mohammed Atta logged into his Travelocity account. Atta was directly responsible for the deaths of more than 1,600 people during the attacks. He led the team of hijackers who took control of American Airlines flight 11 and flew it into the north tower of New York City's World Trade Center. ''They were more concerned about being reimbursed for their rental car,'' he recalled. [3][56] On his return journey, Atta left Karachi on February 24, 2000, by flight TK1057 to Istanbul where he changed to flight TK1661 to Hamburg. Ong provided information about lack of communication with the cockpit, lack of access to the cockpit, and passenger injuries. TERRORIST: Mohammed Atta's mum claims her son is still alive and in Guantanamo Bay . Bin Laden was concerned about having so many operatives in the United States. He mentioned Al Qaeda and said the organization "could use memberships from Americans". [99] Intelligence officials have concluded that such a meeting did not occur. As his father insisted that he go abroad for graduate studies, Atta, to this end, entered a German-language program at the Goethe Institute in Cairo. Passengers must leave the secured area, go outdoors, cross a covered roadway, and enter another building before going through security once again. (L to R, top to bottom) Ahmed Alnami, Ahmed Ibrahim A. al-Haznawi, Ziad Samir al-Jarrah, and Saeed Alghamdi. the suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackings and the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, was a homosexual. [30][41] Atta returned to Hamburg on October 31, 1995,[40] only to join the pilgrimage to Mecca shortly thereafter. It was here that the Hamburg cell developed and acted more as a group. It's Easy to Get Knives and Razors Onto a Plane, the Hijackers Found, The FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit Ignored This Radical Fundamentalist. By the time it took off, Mohammed Atta was just four minutes away from hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Many al-Qaeda members lived in this apartment at various times, including hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi, Zakariya Essabar, and others. Mohammed Atta, 33, and Marwan al-Shehhi, 23, piloted the planes that hit the World Trade Center, the North and South Towers, respectively. He shopped for flights from Washington Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles and from Boston to Los Angeles, all departing around 8:00 a.m. on the morning of September 11. - United Airlines Flight 175 (traveling from Boston to Los Angeles) strikes the South Tower of the World Trade Center . In this series, Newsweek maps the road to 9/11 as it happened 20 years ago, day by day. [37] Atta was anti-Semitic, believing that Jews controlled the world's media, financial, and political institutions from New York City. In the end though, those international calls and Emails open a window to the falsehood of greater authority to intercept communications. Drumhiller said it could have been "to make the final arrangements, to sort of close out everything they were doing to wrap up their time in the states.". [32] Atta Sr. rejected media reports that stated his son was drinking wildly, and instead described his son as a quiet boy uninvolved with politics, shy and devoted to studying architecture. Having little else to do, he mostly studied at home and easily excelled in school. Ramzi bin al-Shibh was also there, teaching occasional classes, and became Atta's friend. [97] After 9/11, there also were reports stating that Mohamed Atta had attended International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. [51] They met three or four times a week to discuss their anti-American feelings and to plot possible attacks. [34] His friends in Germany described him as an intelligent man in whom religious convictions and political motives held equal sway. Political psychologist Jerrold Post has suggested that Atta and his fellow hijackers were just following orders from al-Qaeda leadership, "and whatever their destructive, charismatic leader Osama bin Laden said was the right thing to do for the sake of the cause was what they would do. On December 26, Atta and Shehhi needed a tow for their rented Piper Cherokee on a taxiway of Miami International Airport after the engine shut down. Now, we are living in Germany since a while for study purposes. Footage shows the five hijackers who flew American Flight 77 into the Pentagon progressing through security checks at Washington's Dulles International Airport. He seldom bathed, and they could not bear his "complete, almost aggressive insularity". By early 1993, Atta had moved into university housing with two roommates, in Centrumshaus. Follow the Newsweek live tweet of September 11, 2001 (based upon the new book On That Day) starting at 4:45 a.m. EST @Roadto911. We are going back to the airport. [42] He made acquaintances at al-Quds; some of whom visited him on occasion at Centrumshaus. Financial records and bank video show Atta and Al-Omari made two ATM withdrawals in Portland, and the men were reportedly spotted at an area Wal-Mart, as well as in the parking lot of a Pizza Hut restaurant. The incident, which occurred on a busy travel day at the country's ninth-busiest passenger airport, is especially notable because of how close it brought the two men to official scrutiny. They drove to Cambrils, where they spent a night at the Hotel Monica. But she was also said to be 'emancipated' and 'challenging'. The 9/11 Commission obtained details about the meeting, based on interrogations of bin al-Shibh in the weeks after his arrest in September 2002. He said he later called Signature to arrange to retrieve the airplane and was told that they did pass through the company's offices, at least briefly, before renting a car to return to Venice. Mohamed Atta, right, and Abdulaziz al-Omari are seen passing through security at the Portland Jetport on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Credit: Courtesy of Spectrum News Service It is a day no one . Kersten said in an interview at the agency's headquarters in Wiesbaden that Atta was in Afghanistan from late 1999 until early 2000,[53][54] and that there was evidence that Atta met with Osama bin Laden there. On the morning of September 11, Atta boarded American Airlines Flight 11, which he and his team then hijacked. The date for the planes operation is set. On April 16, Atta was given a citation for not having a valid driver's license, and he began steps to get the license. And so, we still don't know what he was doing there.". Dale Kraus, then the general manager at Huffman, recalled a telephone call that came within minutes of the incident in Miami from an irritated official in the flight tower. On July 26, Atta traveled via Continental Airlines to Newark, New Jersey, checked into the Kings Inn Hotel in Wayne, New Jersey, and stayed there until July 30 when he took a flight from Newark back to Fort Lauderdale. Air traffic controller Danielle O'Brien was at the Dulles Tower outside Washington, D.C., that morning. At this time, the pilots stopped responding to air traffic control, and the aircraft began deviating from the planned route. Mr. Kraus noted that the two men had been trained on smaller, ''uncontrolled'' airports that operate without flight towers. Atta checked in for American Airlines Flight 11, passed through security again, and boarded the flight. Atta stayed in Cairo awhile with his family after Hauth and Bodenstein flew back to Germany. [74], On July 22, 2001, Atta rented a Mitsubishi Galant from Alamo Rent a Car, putting 3,836 miles (6,173km) on the vehicle before returning it on July 26. 1) Making an oath to die and renew your intentions. FBI investigators have officially concluded that 11 of the 19 terrorists who hijacked the aircraft on 11 September did not know they were on a suicide mission, Whitehall . It was Atta who took control of the first hijacked aircraft, American Airlines Flight 11, and told passengers, "Nobody move, everything will be OK. Here he presented an AAA membership for a discount, and paid cash for the $49.50/night room. Mr. Pursell said that because the airport was secured, the two men could not have simply left undetected. The men who planned and carried out the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings staked out the White House before deciding that their targets should be the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and the U.S . The men who would become the pilots of the four hijacked planes began working on the plot in 1999, traveled to the US in 2000, and enrolled in flight training schools. In November 2000, Atta earned his instrument rating, and then a commercial pilot's license in December from the Federal Aviation Administration. Investigators believe the call was to confirm the attacks were ready to begin. During that time Atta flew out of Briscoe Field in Lawrenceville with a pilot, and Atta and either the pilot or Shehhi flew around the Atlanta area. Both enrolled at Jones Aviation in Sarasota and took training there for a brief time. According to the interrogations of KSM and Ramzi Bin al-Shibh (his interlocutor in Germany), Mohammed Atta was worried about the communications, Atta's real concern being that Jarrah might be unable to break away from his wife, that it would just be too painful in the end for him to follow through with his suicide flight. [12], When Atta was ten, his family moved to the Cairo neighborhood of Abdeen, situated near the city center. [73][74] After bin al-Shibh returned to Germany on July 16, 2001, Atta had three more days in Spain. Twenty-three minutes later, Atta flew that plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. . [94], On October 1, 2006, The Sunday Times released a video it had obtained "through a previously tested channel", purporting to show Mohamed Atta and Ziad Jarrah recording a martyrdom message six months earlier at a training camp in Afghanistan. A separate section of the video shows Osama bin Laden addressing his followers at a complex near Kandahar. By the time it took off, Mohammed Atta was just four minutes away from hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Likewise, Shehhi traveled from a different location, in his case via Brussels. [103] Shaffer largely based his allegations on the recollections of Navy Captain, Scott Phillpott,[104] who later recanted his recollection, telling investigators that he was "convinced that Atta was not on the chart that we had." [6] At 8:18am, flight attendants Betty Ong and Madeline Amy Sweeney began making phone calls to American Airlines to report what was happening. . Several clues have been found to link their stay in Spain to Syrian-born Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas (Abu Dahdah), and Amer el Azizi, a Moroccan in Spain. The date for the planes operation is set. This was the last transmission heard from Flight 11. Thirty minutes later, Marwan al-Shehhi hit the South Tower. United States and Czech intelligence officials have since concluded that the person seen with Ani was mistakenly identified as Atta, and the consensus of investigators is that Atta never attended a meeting in Prague. "Nothing they said or did raised any suspicions at all," he told the commission's investigators. Flesh or bone from 13 of the 19 Al Qaeda terrorists who flew passenger jets into . ET (approx.) Bin al-Shibh would not discuss this meeting with Fouda. On November 29, 1999, Mohamed Atta boarded Turkish Airlines Flight TK1662 from Hamburg to Istanbul, where he changed to flight TK1056 to Karachi, Pakistan. Bryant said "the picture that came out in the newspaper, that's exactly what that man looked like. Madam Speaker, I say to the Speaker and to the Members that the ghost of Mohamad Atta has attacked our Nation. Just stay quiet." On June 28, Atta arrived at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas to meet with the three other pilots. Turning toward New York. On December 29 and 30, Atta and Marwan went to the Opa-locka Airport where they practiced on a Boeing 727 simulator, and they obtained Boeing 767 simulator training from Pan Am International on December 31. This encounter took place "around the third week of April to the third week of May of 2000", before Atta's official entry date into the United States (see below). Mohammed Atta sat in seat 8D in Business Class. We hate America and all that it stands for. [38] The instructions in his last will and testament reflect both Sunni funeral practices along with some more puritanical demands from Salafism, including asking people not "to weep and cry" and to generally refrain from showing emotion. Given the vagaries of traveling on the East Coast, (it was a) tremendous risk to take. In the Czech Republic, some intelligence officials say the source of the purported meeting was an Arab informant who approached the Czech intelligence service with his sighting of Atta only after Atta's photograph had appeared in newspapers all over the world. They learned of a massive terrorist attack underway, concluding that they had to take action to down the plane: it was not being hijacked to land and for demands to be made. [33], After coming to Hamburg in 1992, Atta grew more religiously fanatical and frequented the mosque with greater regularity. He was therefore treated favorably and not scrutinized. On April 3, Atta and Shehhi rented a postal box in Virginia Beach, Virginia. By this view, Atta's political and religious beliefs affected the method of his suicide and his choice of target, but they were not the underlying causes of his behavior. "This begs the question of why the pilots had not punched in the hijack code of 7500, also known as Squawking, if things were happening on the plane before the hijackers gained entry to the . Then at 8:50pm, he checked into the Hotel Diana Cazadora in Barajas, a town near the airport. The night before, Atta went to Portland, Maine, a trip that has mystified terrorism experts for five years. Mohammed Atta, (born September 1, 1968, Kafr al-Shaykh, Egyptdied September 11, 2001, New York, New York, U.S.), Egyptian militant Islamist and al-Qaeda operative who helped plot and lead the September 11 attacks. "Might have just been doing surveillance detection just to see if somebody might have been following him up in that area, Drumhiller said. Atta returned to Hamburg in February 2000, and began inquiring about flight training in the United States. Mr. Pursell, meanwhile, had already gotten a cellphone call from Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi. Almost all of these points discuss spiritual preparation, such as prayer and citing religious scripture. "There's a real question there because he took a tremendous risk in going to Portland the night before and then having to catch a commuter flight to Boston, said Roger Cressey, who was director of transnational threats for President Bush's National Security Council. Atta confirmed that all the muscle hijackers had arrived in the United States, without any problems, but said that he needed five to six more weeks to work out details.

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