Posted on 05/13/2002 8:26:50 PM PDT by denydenydeny
"We love death. The US loves life. That is the big difference between us."
--Osama Bin Laden
THE HIJACKERS
FLIGHT 11
Mohammed ATTA (11) (also known as Mohammed al-Amir) Born September 1, 1968 in Kafr al Sheikh, Egypt. ATTA grows up in Cairo with his middle-class family.
Abdulaziz ALOMARI (11) Saudi Arabian. Little is known about him.
Walid AL-SHEHRI (11) From Khamis Mushayt in Saudi Arabia. Former teacher, who left his job allegedly to consult an Islamic holy man about his brothers mental illness.
Satam AL-SUQAMI (11) Born June 28, 1976. Saudi Arabian. Islamic-law-school student at King Fahd University in Riyadh. College roommate of MOQED.
Wail ALSHEHRI (11) Born 7/31/73. Brother of Walid. Former phys-ed teacher who left his job because of mental illness.
FLIGHT 175
Marwan AL-SHEHHI (175) Born in United Arab Emirates on 5/9/78.
Hamza ALGHAMDI(175) Born 11/18/80. From Beljurashi in southern Saudi Arabia. Was working in a humiliating job as a stockboy in a housewares shop when he was recruited for the jihad.
Ahmed ALGHAMDI(175) From Beljurashi in southern Saudi Arabia. Fayez Rashid Ahmed Hassan Al-Qadi BANIHAMMAD (175-4) (aka Fayez Ahmed) Citizen of United Arab Republic.
Mohand ALSHEHRI (175) Former student at the Imam Muhammed Ibn Saud Islamic University in Abha, Saudi Arabia for one semester.
FLIGHT 77
Hani HANJOUR (77)- Saudi Arabian Born August 13, 1972. Son of a wealthy businessman from the wealthy al-Faisaliyah section of Taif.
Khalid ALMIDHAR (77) Saudi Arabian. Veteran Al-Qaeda operative about whom little is known.
Majed MOQED (77) Saudi Arabian. Law student at the King Fahd University in Riyadh. The son of a head of the Baniauf tribe from Annakhil near Medina. Sometimes listed as the third logistics person after ALMIDHAR and Nawaq ALHAZMI.
Nawaq ALHAZMI (77) "He told me once that his father had tried to kill him when he was a child. He never told me why, but he had a long knife scar on his forearm," said an acquaintance. Brother of a police chief in the coastal town of Jizan.
Salem ALHAZMI (77) Saudi.
FLIGHT 93
Ziad al-JARRAH (93) Born in Al Marj, Lebanon May 11, 1975. The son of a civil servant and a schoolteacher. Educated in a Catholic school in Beirut.
Ahmed ALNAMI (93) Born December 1977. Saudi, from the town of Abha. Former law student at the King Khaled University Islamic Law School in Abha.
Ahmed Ibrahim AL-HAZNAWI (93) Born October 11, 1980. Saudi from the village of Hezna. Son of an imam, and reportedly became one himself. Close to Hamza and Ahmed ALGHAMDI.
Saeed ALGHAMDI (93) Saudi, from Khamis Mushayt.
12 of the hijackers were from the underdeveloped, highly-tribal southwestern provinces of Saudi Arabia, along Highway 15. Osama Bin Laden knew this region well, as the highway had been built by his father. Highway 15 runs from south of Mecca through Taif and al-Baha province into the mountains of Asir. Bin Ladens father, in fact, died in a 1967 plane crash while surveying the highway. Most of the hijackers originally wanted to fight in Chechnya, but Al-Qaeda operatives directed them to Afghanistan for martyrdom training. Link
ASSOCIATES
GERMANY
Ramzi BINALSHIBH Born in Hadramout, Yemen (a remote area adjacent to Saudi Arabia where the family of accused terrorist leader Osama bin Laden also has roots) May 1, 1972. Al-Quds mosque attendee. Zakaria ESSABAR (Hamburg) Moroccan immigrant living in Hamburg, Germany. Al-Quds member. Mohammed Haydar ZAMMAR (Hamburg) Born in Syria, another from Aleppo. 66, 300 lbs. Later lives in Hamburg with wife and six children and attends the Al-Quds mosque.
Mamoun DARZAKANLI (Hamburg) Born in Damascus in 1958. Lived in Aleppo, ATTAs favorite city; became German ciitizen in 1990. Al-Quds mosque member. Runs an import-export business that does almost no importing or exporting. Had signing power over the bank account of Mamdouh Salim, later convicted of complicity in the 1998 embassy bombings.
Said BAHAJI (Hamburg) Born in Haseluenne, Germany July 15, 1975 to a Moroccan immigrant and his German wife Annaliese, who ran a restaurant together. BAHAJI moved with his family to Morocco in 1984 and went to school there. Returned to Germany in the 1990s and joined the Al-Quds mosque.
Mounir el-MOTASSADEQ (Hamburg) Born in 1974. Moroccan immigrant. Al-Quds member.
Agus BUDIMAN (Hamburg/USA) Indonesian Muslim who lived in Hamburg and attended the Al-Quds mosque.
Adly el-ATTAR (Neu-Ulm) A doctor with a medical practice in Neu-Ulm, Germany that is almost never open. He spends most of his time flying back and forth to Sudan. Married to a German woman who was shipped off to Sudan and was not allowed to return.
Mohammed BELFASAnother Al-Quds attendee of Malaysian birth who came to the USA with BUDIMAN.
Abdelghani MZOUDI, another Al-Quds member who co-signed ATTA's will along with Motassadeq.
MALAYSIA
Yazid SUFAAT-- alleged al-Qaeda operative who was arrested in December after returning from Afghanistan, where authorities say he fought against U.S.-led forces. He is believed to have been MOUSSAOUI's primary paymaster. Moussaoui indictment says Sufaat paid him $35,000 at a meeting in Malaysia in October 2000 and agreed to pay him $2,500 a month after. Sufaat is believed to have attended the January 2000 meeting of al-Qaeda operatives and Sept. 11 hijackers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Riduan ISAMUDDIN
Fahad AL-QUSO
Tawfiq BIN ATASHThe previous three are all known Al-Qaeda operatives who participated in the January 2000 Cole bombing meeting in Malaysia.
U.K
Richard REID (London) British convert to Islam. Attended the same Brixton mosque as MOUSSAOUI, though it is unclear that they ever met.
SHAKUR 34 years old. Believed to be North African.
Omar Al-BAYOUMI (Birmingham). Saudi. Allegedly pays the rent for ALMIDHARs San Diego apartment. Has been missing since at least September 11.
SPAIN
Imad Eddin Barakat YARKAS. His phone number is found in ATTAs Marienstrasse apartment. He is another Syrian from Aleppo.
IRAQ (via the CZECH REPUBLIC)
Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir AL-ANI. Iraqi diplomat and alleged intelligence agent who reportedly meets on multiple occasions with ATTA
USA
Zacharias MOUSSAOUIBorn in Saint-Jean-de-Luz in southwestern France on May 30, 1968, the son of Moroccan immigrants.
Husseim AL-ATTAS (Norman, Oklahoma) Saudi. Roommate of MOUSSAOUI.
Mukarram ALI (Norman, Oklahoma) Associate of MOUSSAOUI.
Mujahid Abdulqaadir (Norman, Oklahoma). Associate of MOUSSAOUI.
Osama AWADALLAH, (San Diego). Associate of Nawaq ALHAZMI and ALMIDHAR. Mohamed ABDI (Virginia)Somali immigrant. His name is found in Nawaq ALHAZMIs car on September 11.
Eyad ALRABABAHJordanian who specializes in obtaining illegal Virginia drivers licenses.
Mohdar ABDALLAHAssociate of ALMIDHAR and Nawaq ALHAZMI in San Diego, who helped them obtain Social Security numbers.
CANADA
Nabil AL-MARABH (Toronto)
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Mustafa Ahmed AL-HAWSAWI (aka Mustafa Ahmed) Born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on August 5, 1968. Real name unknown.
CHRONOLOGY
1985ATTA begins to study architecture in the Engineering department at Cairo University. According to his peers, he is an average student.
1990ATTA joins the Engineers Syndicate, which is one of three professional associations controlled by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, although he later says that he was not a member of the Brotherhood.
1990HANJOUR appears at the University of Arizona in Tucson for an eight-week English course. He had come to the USA to visit his brother Abulrahman, who was an automobile importer. At the end of the course, he returns to Saudi Arabia to manage the familys lemon and date farm in Taif for at least five years. He did not travel abroad during this time, according to his brother. WP 9/30/01 and 10/15/01
1992MOUSSAOUI arrives in Britain from France. He becomes attracted to events at the Fourth Feathers Centre, where an Islamic cleric, Abu Qatada, addressed an eager audience of young radicals (18 videos of his lectures will eventually be found in BINALSHIBHs apartment). MOUSSAOUI lives on the top floor of a housing association block in Streatham and later in a ground-floor flat in Brixton, with a north African girlfriend who may have visited ATTA in Spain and has been sought by police since September 11. His brother, Abd-Samad Moussaoui, said: He began to change when he went to Britain. It was there that he got drawn into an extremist group. All alone in London, he found friendships within the Islamic fundamentalist groups littered around London's mosques. I noticed a change in his attitude when he came back to France. He became racist, a black racist. Link
October 1992ATTA arrives in Germany shortly after receiving a bachelors degree in Cairo. He has a student visa to attend the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg (TUHH) to study urban planning. For some reason, he claims to be from the United Arab Emirates when he registers. After disagreements with a host family, he lives in a student dormitory near campus. He has several Christian friends. His friends do not yet believe him to be a radical Muslim, even though he is given to saying things like Im more fundamental than the fundamentalists. ATTA announces that he is troubled by what he sees as social injustice and the inequitable distribution of wealth in the world. Others remember him as someone who wanted to promote harmony among the religions. His fellow students at TUHH include MOTASSADEQ, who is studying electrical engineering. LAT 9/27/01, 1/27/02
December 1992ATTA gets a part-time job at Plankontor, an urban planning consultancy in Ottensen, Hamburg.
1993al-Qaeda acquires a private plane and sends a pilot to Airman Flight School in Oklahoma in the first instance of Osama bin Ladens interest in aviation. Link
1993 MOUSSAOUI starts to attend classes at a London trade school, South Bank University.
1994ATTA applies for a fellowship in development policy with the Carl-Duisburg Society, an organization dedicated to development issues. ATTA will attend many seminars within Germany for the next several years, owing to this fellowship. Also during this year, he goes on a student trip to Istanbul, Turkey. Later this year, he travels to Aleppo, Syria for several weeks to research what would become his thesis, the conflict between Islam and modernity as reflected in the planning of historical cities. ATTA then takes six months off from Plankontor to make pilgrimage, and sends his Christian friends a postcard from Mecca.
1994A French investigating magistrate, Roger Leloire, is in London investigating the assassination of three French consular officials in Algeria and trying to find a match for an individual identified only as "Zacarias." MOUSSAOUI was doing a masters degree in business at South Bank University at the time.
December 1994ATTA returns to Syria and makes contact with members of the committee of the project to revive old Aleppo.
About 1995BINALSHIBH arrives in Germany, moves to Hamburg.
Mid-1990sBAHAJI returns to Germany from Morocco to study electrical engineering in Hamburg. In the student housing where he lives, he meets ATTA and BINALSHIBH.
1995MOUSSAOUI graduates from South Bank University with a Masters degree in International Business Studies.
August 1995ATTA grows an Islamic-style beard before a three-month research trip to Egypt. He stops listening to music and listens only to recitations of the Koran on tape.
Mid-1990sMOUSSAOUI is said to have formed strong ties with extremists Muslims in London. He attends the same mosque in Brixton, south London, as Richard REID, the future shoe bomber. REID arrives at Brixton Mosque around this time and goes by the name Abdel Rahim. A petty criminal with a string of convictions for street crime such as muggings, he is believed to have served time in several prisons, where he converted to Islam.
1996ATTA begins attending the Al-Quds Mosque.
April 11, 1996 [the document is dated March 6, 1996]ATTA signs his bizarre will at the Al-Quds mosque: I dont want any women to go to my grave at all during the funeral or any occasion thereafter the person who will wash my body near the genitals must wear gloves on his hand. MOTASSADEQ and MZOUDI are the two witnesses. CNN 11/29/01 Link
April 1996JARRAH arrives in Greifswald, Germany with his cousin Salim. They live together in a dorm at the University of Greifswald for the next year-and-a-half. In Greifswald, according to German authorities, JARRAH is radicalized by Abdul Rahman al-Makadi, who runs a small Islamic study group [WSJ, 12/24/01]. JARRAH meets and begins to date a Turkish girl, Aysel Sengun, with whom he continues a relationship until the end of his life. CBC 10/1/01 Link
Late March 1996HANJOUR returns to the USA with the announced goal of becoming a pilot (prior to September 11, Saudi pilots were required to be certified by the American FAA). He first stays in Miramar, Florida with a family that he had met in Tucson. His hosts remember him as mousy and gentle, with a weak personality and poor hygiene. HANJOUR had hoped to attend flight school in Florida, but he wasn't a good student and had trouble getting in. He leaves Florida after being accepted to a flight school in Oakland. SPT 10/2/01 Link
Late April 1996HANJOUR arrives in northern California. Apparently at this time, he studies at an intensive ELS program on the campus of Holy Names College in Oaklandthe same school that he would use as a pretext to gain entry to the US in December 2000. The school arranges for HANJOUR to stay with a host family. Link
September 8, 1996HANJOUR enrolls at the Sierra Academy of Aeronautics in Oakland. He attends one 30-minute class and never returns. He is deterred by the schools two-year regimen and $35,000 price tag.
October 1996HANJOUR attends CRM Airline Training Center in Scottsdale, Arizona for the last three months of 1996. Then he "sort of disappeared," reappearing a year later at the end of 1997. HANJOUR pays $3800 by check and $1000 in cash for his instruction. LAT 9/27/01 He rents a house in Scottsdale with other Middle Eastern men.
February 1997ESSABAR moves to Germany from Morocco.
Early 1997AL-SHEHHI comes to Bonn, Germany on a military scholarship. There is a report that he came to Germany to escape a bullying half-brother who had forced him into a marriage that lasted only two weeks. Link According to witnesses, he was not a fanatic when he arrived. He receives free German lessons at the University of Bonn. He pays $255 a month to stay at a familys guestroom.
July 1997ATTA is laid off from Plankontor [LAT 11/27/02 says late 1996]
Mid-1997JARRAH moves to Hamburg and boards in a house owned by a German woman. It is around this time that he starts attending Al-Quds. After a few months, he grows a beard and starts to keep a small prayer mat in his room.
September 1997JARRAH begins to study aeronautical engineering and aircraft construction and design at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, maintaining above-average grades in his two years there.
Fall 1997ATTA leaves TUHH for a year until October 1998. He does not disappear entirely, as many accounts claim. He participates in multiple seminars in different parts of Germany during this time. The longest absence is about two months (probably August-September) in 1998, when it is believed that he made his first trip to Afghanistan for terrorist training and the bayat (loyalty oath) to Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. U.S. authorities have evidence that ATTA and several other hijackers met with senior Al Qaida leaders, most notably Ayman al-Zawahiri. Link
December 1997-- HANJOUR returns to CRM Airline Training Center in December 1997. He puts down a $100 deposit toward further training, but does not attend any classes. Afterwards, HANJOUR calls back numerous times to ask about further instruction. At least once HANJOUR says he is living in Florida, and that he is continuing with his training.
1997-98There is a vague, unsubstantiated story in the Spanish press that ATTA appears in the Valencia-Tarragona area of Spain around this time among Arab students at the local medical school, or even is a student himself. The sighting is highly unlikely. Link
1998DARKAZANLI first comes the attention of German investigators when they learn he has power of attorney over a German bank account opened by bin Laden's suspected financial chief, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim. Salim is later convicted in the USA for the African embassy bombings.
April 1998According to the federal indictment, MOUSSAOUI trains at the Khalden terrorist training camp in Afghanistan at this time. Hamza ALGHAMDIis there at the same time, and the two allegedly become close associates. Link At some point he may have also gone to Chechnya. Link
Summer 1998During his summer vacation, JARRAH works at a Volkswagen factory on the night shift along with ESSABAR. Around this time he starts to insist that his girlfriend Aysel wear a headscarf and stop listening to Western music.
Around mid-1998HANJOUR approaches the Sawyer School of Aviation in Phoenix. He trains at Sawyer for about a year. Link
September 2, 1998A Hani Saleh HANJOUR receives a traffic ticket in Mesa, AZ for driving with no insurance and an expired license plate. Link
October 1998ATTA returns to the university with a carefully shaved beard. To his friends he appears much changedserious and unsmiling. Presumably he and JARRAH meet around this time. By now ATTA is believed to be an operational commander in Al-Qaeda. He begins the hard work of forming a terror cell. He takes a part-time warehouse job for Hay Computing Service GmbH in the Hamburg suburb of Wentorf, packing computers for shipment. BINALSHIBH is a co-worker. There are also stories that ATTA holds a variety of other odd jobs, including work as a used-car dealer in an open-air car market. Link
October 31, 1998ATTA, BAHAJI, and BINALSHIBH move into an apartment on 54 Marienstrasse in Hamburg. BAHAJI signs the lease and pays the rent each month. After they move out in 1999, ATTA pays the rent on the flat by bank transfer every month until September 2001; in the space on the paperwork for the reason for the transfer, he writes Beit al-Ansar, or house of the followers. No one seems to pick up on the reference to the original Beit-al-Ansar, which was the name of Osama Bin Ladens guesthouse in Peshawar, Pakistan, where he began to train mujahedeen for the holy war in Afghanistan beginning in 1984. The FBI believes that ATTA and AL-SHEHHI, at least, had stayed at the Peshawar guesthouse at some point in 1999. During this time, ATTA abandons Western clothes and starts dressing in Islamic attire. At least six Arab students come for regular meetings there. Sometimes the visitors number as many as 20. The only request they make of their landlord is high-speed phone lines for their two computers. The men are seen ''in a circle on the floor, painting things on paper, which they put up on the wall.'' Later, they put up blinds on the windows. Link Link JARRAH is said to stay there intermittently.
At this time, in the wake of the embassy bombings in East Africa, the Marienstrasse apartment is under police surveillance by the German national Verfassungsschutz for an extensive period, according to Der Spiegel. The reason for the surveillance is the ongoing investigation of the known Al-Qaeda operative DARKAZANLI, whose ties to BAHAJI lead them to the Marienstrasse apartment, but no overt terrorist activity is observed, and the surveillance is discontinued.
January 1999--ATTA and MOTASSADEQ found the Islam Group at the university. In his application to the student government president, who opposed religious meetings on campus, ATTA wrote, If I cannot pray, I cannot study. The New York Times later reported that German police believe that the group served as a front for terror meetings. On September 11, ATTA was still listed as the current school director of the schools Islamic Working Group. Link
Early 1999AL-SHEHHI takes a trial course at the Albatros Air flight school in Bonn, Germany. He insists on flying over chemical plants, the defense ministry and other government buildings. SMH 10/11/01
Later in 1999AL-SHEHHI moves to Hamburg and enrolls in TUHH. Presumably this is when he meets ATTA (through ATTAs Islamic prayer group, according to investigators) and finds his way to Al-Quds, where he meets JARRAH, ESSABAR, and BINALSHIBH. Around this time, ATTA joins a gym in Hamburg.
June 1999ATTA finishes his thesis and avoids shaking hands with his female professor. He dedicates it: My prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death belong to Allah, the Master of the worlds.
April 1999HANJOUR has finally accumulated enough hours (250) to fly with an FAA examiner for his commercial pilots license. An Arab-American flight instructor signs off on his credentials. The license is awarded and issued later that year. The address on the license is a P.O. box in Saudi Arabia. According to his family, he returns to Saudi Arabia at this time but is unable to get a job as a pilot there. Humiliated, he spends his time online at an Internet café owned by his family, and listening to cassette tapes of militant Islamic preachers. He is not generally believed to have returned to the USA until December 2000. Link
April 1999 (some sources say summer 1999) ATTA is seen by multiple witnesses at the Woodland Park Resort and Hotel in Mabalacat, Phillipines, on the outskirts of Clark Field. He has his first flying lessons on ultralights at the Angeles City Flying Club. He is accompanied by as many as 10 other Arabs, including AL-SHEHHI, according to some witnesses. There are ATTA sightings in the Philippines as far back as 1997. Link Link Immigration records show several trips to the Philippines in 1999 and 2000 by Saeed ALGHAMDI (though this is a very common Saudi name and may not be the same person), and one 2000 visit by AHMED/BANIHAMMAD.
Summer 1999--When his landlady moves to a new house in Hummelsbuettel, JARRAH follows her. This address is the one that would appear on JARRAHs FAA pilots license. By the summer of 1999 he was spending some of his time in the city of Bochum with his girlfriend, who is a medical student at the university there.
Summer 1999ATTA is again in Afghanistan around this time, according to investigators. Frontier Post (Pakistan) 11/11/2001
Late summer-to-fall 1999ALNAMI returns to his hometown of Abha from a Saudi-government-sponsored religious summer camp and undergoes a rapid change into fundamentalism. He becomes a muezzin at the Abha mosque, and sometimes performs this function at the mosque in the nearby town of Khamis Mushayt. This is where he meets the AL-SHEHRI brothers. In the fall, he enters the highly-fundamentalist School of Islamic Law at King Khaled University. There he befriends fellow Abha native Saeed ALGHAMDI.
September 1, 1999ESSABAR moves into the Marienstrasse apartment. He lives there for over a year.
September 1999Though registered for the semester, JARRAH leaves after one class session. He tells his landlady that he is spending time with friends in nearby Harburgwhich is the location of the Marienstrasse apartment. He tells fellow students that he wants to continue his studies in America, but he does not travel to the USA until late May 2000. Family members suspect that at this time he underwent terrorist training in Afghanistan.
October 5, 1999 The London-based Terrorism and Security Monitor reports that US intelligence sources are worried that terrorist Osama Bin Laden may be planning a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil. US sources are said "to be particularly concerned about some kind of attack on New York, and they have recommended stepped-up security at the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Reserve. Link
Mid-October 1999BAHAJI marries 21-year-old Nese Kul, a Turk, at the Al-Quds mosque. MOTASSADEQ, DARKAZANLI, ATTA, AL-SHEHHI, JARRAH, and ESSABAR also attend the ceremony. After the wedding, she starts veiling herself. Around this time, ATTA and AL-SHEHHI move into an apartment on the Wilhelmstrasse, around the corner from the Marienstrasse apartment. Probably this indicates that the attacks had been decided upon. By this time ATTA is on the German aliens register with three different identities. AJC 10/24/01
November 1999 Nawaq ALHAZMI (whose name is on the lease) and Khalid ALMIDHAR move into apartment 127 at Parkwood Apartments, a 175-unit apartment complex in the Clairemont, section of San Diego on Mount Ada Road near the mosque off Balboa Drive. Neighbors report them playing flight-simulator videogames late into the night. They are constantly on their cell phones. They drive a gray early-90s Toyota Camry, but are seen getting into limousines late at night. (Time 11/1/01) Link ALMIDHAR lists the same address the following spring. Allegedly Omar AL-BAYOUMI pays their rent. (Observer 10/28/01) ALMIDHAR comes and goes. The apartment manager never even learns his name. Witnesses said that a total of four men spent all their time together, and described how they played in the pool like children, but only when no one else was there. There does not appear to be any documentation on how the two of them entered the country. The Guardian 9/23/01 says that Nawaq ALHAZMI (along with Ahmed AGHAMDI) fought in Chechnya, but there is no other confirmation of this.
Late 1999AL-HAZNAWI asks his father for permission to join the jihad in Chechnya, but is refused.
Late 1999Wail AL-SHEHRI falls into a deep depression and takes a leave of absence from his teaching duties.
Late 1999-- during a trip to Bavaria in southern Germany, according to the German newspaper Bild, ATTA, AL-SHEHHI, and JARRAH all report their passports lost and receive new ones without suspicious stamps from Pakistan and Afghanistan. (or Iraq, suggests an Interior Ministry source) to make it easier to travel to the United States Link
Late 1999French investigators inform MOUSSAOUIs mother that her sons name was found in the address book of a man who had died fighting for the Muslims in Bosnia. LAT 12/31/01
January 3, 2000Commemorating the night of power in the Islamic month of Ramadan, there is an unsuccessful attempt to bomb the USS The Sullivans in Aden harbor, Yemen. It fails when the attack boat sinks in the harbor. CNN 12/20/01
January 5, 2000ALMIDHAR and Nawaq ALHAZMI, (some sources say only ALHAZMI) attend an Al-Qaeda meeting (convened, no doubt, in response to the failed destroyer bombing) with Yazid SUFAAT and Riduan ISAMUDDIN, Fahad AL-QUSO (who is assigned to videotape the Cole bombing but fell asleep when the time came), and high-level figure Tawfiq BIN ATASH, in Malaysia. Their presence at the site of the meeting is recorded on surveillance video, and results in ALMIDHAR and ALHAZMI being put eventually on the FBIs terrorist Watch List. The operation discussed is presumably the upcoming terrorist bombing of the USS Cole, which occurs October 12.San Diego Union-Tribune, 9/15/01 BINALSHIBH is also said to have attended, but he is not identified until after September 11. Link Given that after the meeting, ALMIDHAR and ALHAZMI went almost directly to the USA and were soon showing up at flight schools, there is no doubt that the 9/11 plot was discussed and approved there.
January 15, 2000ALMIDHAR (77-2) arrives in Los Angeles on a flight from Bangkok, Thailand. Nawaq ALHAZMI (77) arrives in Los Angeles on a flight from Hong Kong. They have B-2 tourist visas and Saudi passports in their own names. They give phony destinations, ALMIDHAR a Marriott in New York City, ALHAZMI a Sheraton in Los Angeles. ABDALLAH later takes them to the United Airlines ticket counter to help them obtain a refund on the unused portions of their Malaysia/Bangkok/Los Angeles tickets. ABDALLAH also calls flight schools in Florida to try to enroll them.
January 18, 2000AL-SHEHHI obtains a U.S. tourist visa issued in Dubai, UAE. It is not clear if he obtains it in person or not.
Early 2000According to German intelligence, between January and May 2000 ATTA visits pharmacies in Frankfurt am Main and purchases chemicals that could be used to make explosives, the German magazine Focus reported. Link
At some point in 2000Nawaq ALHAZMI is supposed to have worked briefly at a gas station near San Diego. This is the only known instance of any of the hijackers having any kind of actual job in the USA. Except for this very brief moment, the hijackers live with no visible means of support. AJC 10/21/01
Also at some unspecified point in 2000, AL-HAZNAWI goes off to train (against his fathers wishes) at the Al-Farouk camp near Khost, Afghanistan.
March 22, 2000The Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma receives an e-mail from ATTA asking for information about the school. Link
Spring 2000At the Seqeley mosque in Khamis Mushayt, ALNAMI, Saeed ALGHAMDI, and the AL-SHEHRI brothers pledge to join the jihad. Shortly after that, they all disappear from Saudi Arabia. They travel to the Al-Farouk camp in Afghanistan for training. They or their friends brag about their decision on alsaha.com, a popular Saudi site.
Spring 2000There are multiple dubious ATTA sightings in the USA. If true, they would require ATTA to have entered the USA well before his first known entry date in June. There are reports that ATTA and perhaps AL-SHEHHI were regulars at the Portland, ME, Public Library in the spring of 2000, and frequently use the public Internet terminals there. Boston Herald, 10/5/01 There is also a report on one website that ATTA and AL-SHEHHI are seen in Punta Gorda, FL as early as April 2000, training at a flight school called Professional Aviation, 30 miles from their future flight school in Venice. There is absolutely no other confirmation of this story. Link
April 2000Nawaq ALHAZMI takes a 90-minute flight-training class in San Diego, accompanied by another person the flight instructor doesnt recall. It is to have been the first of a series of lessons ending, ultimately, in a pilots license. But ALHAZMI never shows up again . (Bergen Record, 9/17/01)
May 2000AL-SHEHHIs bank account, managed (allegedly) by MOTASSADEQ, begins disbursing cash to ATTA and the other hijackers. The wire transfers from this account last through November 2000. Payments around this time include DM 5000 to BINALSHIBH, presumably to pay for his anticipated flight training in the USA.
May 2000ALMIDHAR and Nawaq ALHAZMI appear at a San Diego flying club owned by Fereidoun "Fred" Sorbi. They immediately want to fly Boeings, but are told they must work their way up to large jets. They offer him extra money to teach them to fly multi-engine planes. Sorbi gives them introductory lessons in a Cessna or Piper. Each man takes an hour at the controls. ALMIDHAR prays loudly as his friend approaches landing. This is not going to work out Sorbi tells them. WP 9/30/01
May 17, 2000BINALSHIBH makes his first application for a U.S. visa. The application is denied.
May 18, 2000ATTA uses his new passport to obtain a U.S. tourist visa in Berlin Germany.
May 21,2000A U.S. student visa is issued to JARRAH in Berlin. He apparently uses BUDIMANs address on the visa application.
Late May, 2000A man calling himself Hani shows up with Nawaq ALHAZMI at Sorbi's flying club in San Diego. WP 9/30/01 If this is HANJOUR, this would be his only known appearance in the USA between spring 1999 and December 2000.
May 29, 2000AL-SHEHHI arrives in the USA at Newark Airport.
May 30, 2000ATTA flies into Prague in the Czech Republic before he travels to the USA for the first time. He is not allowed to leave the airport because he lacks a visa. He flies back to Germany. CSM 10/29/01 Link
June 2000Around this time ALMIDHAR vanishes and does not reappear in America for a year. Link
June 1, 2000In Germany, ATTA goes to a Czech consulate and obtains the proper visa.
June 2, 2000According to Czech officials, ATTA arrives in Prague by bus (CSM 10/29/01)and stays there for 24 hours. According to Czech sources ATTA meets with Iraqi intelligence official AL-ANI in his one day in Prague. The source says that Czech officials believe that AL-ANI may have provided ATTA with fake passports for the hijackers WSJ 10/22/01
June 3, 2000Arriving on a Czech Airlines flight from Prague, ATTA enters U.S. for the first time at Newark. He is given a temporary visitors visa until December 2, 2000. He rents a car.
June 4, 2000 or thereaboutsATTA and another unnamed hijacker (almost certainly AL-SHEHHI) move into a room in Brooklyn, NY. Later in the month, they answer a room for rent ad and move to the Bronx. ATTAs rental car receives a parking ticket while in Brooklyn. Link
June 15, 2000BINALSHIBH applies a second time for a U.S. visa. The application is again denied.
June 27, 2000JARRAH arrives in the U.S. for the first time at Atlanta, GA, on a flight from Munich. After September 11, at one of JARRAHs addresses in Hamburg, police find a note saying Morning will come. The victors will arrive. We pledge we will defeat you. The earth will shake beneath your feet. During JARRAHs time in America, he receives $2000 a month from his family in Lebanon as a stipend.
June 29, 2000---$9,985 is wired from the UAE into the ATTA-AL-SHEHHI joint account.
Late June 2000 (most sources say July, but given the dates they were in Florida, July is extremely unlikely)ATTA and AL-SHEHHI tour the Airman Flight Training School in Norman, Oklahoma. Possibly they also tour another facility in Texas. They stay overnight at the nearby Sooner Inn before deciding for unknown reasons to train at another facility. LAT 9/27/01
July 2000MOTASSADEQ travels to Karachi, Pakistan for what he later calls a vacation, leaving his wife and small child alone for several weeks. But, when asked, he is unable to recall exactly when he went there, how long he was there, where he stayed or what exactly he did. Link The Pakistanis later confirm that he had been in the country at this time and that there were "indications" that he had visited an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. While in Pakistan, MOTASSADEQ stays at the hotel in Karachi where BAHAJI and two others, believed to be ESSABAR and BINALSHIBH using aliases, stayed a year later after fleeing Germany. WP 11/28/01
July 1, 2000ATTA and AL-SHEHHI tour Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida.
July 3, 2000---ATTA and AL-SHEHHI begin flying lessons on a Cessna 152 and Piper Seneca at Huffman Aviation with the cover story that they are cousins who want to be commercial pilots in the UAE. (Sometimes they tell people that they are a Saudi prince and his bodyguard).Combined, they pay nearly $40,000 for about 300 hours of flying time. AL-SHEHHI pays slightly more because ATTA does have some flying experience. The two men pay $1,000 a week each, using checks drawn from a Suntrust Bank branch in downtown Venice. They arrive with nothing but cash, according a bookkeeper at Huffman, Charlie Voss, who briefly rents the two men a room in his home, for which they paid about $250 in cash. "Then they went down to the bank and opened up an account. I probably recommended that bank to them; it was the same bank the company used." The SunTrust account will receive $109,440 in four wire transfers from the UAE. AL-SHEHHI opens a separate SunTrust account which eventually receives $100,000 in wire transfers.. Each of the four hijack teams has its own bank account. All of the bank cards for all four accounts use the same PIN.
Behind his back, two staff members called the flight student "the little terrorist." "If you had to characterize him, it would be this way: He tried to be intimidating, but he didn't have the stature," said one. "He had hate oozing from him. You did not want to be in his presence. Rudi Dekkers, owner of Huffman Aviation: My personal feeling was ATTA was an asshole, first-class, and AL-SHEHHI was a very nice, likable person. Link
Their rudeness, especially to Vosss wife, gets them kicked out after a week. ATTA and AL-SHEHHI move into a coral two-bedroom house in nearby Nokomis, near Sarasota, which is now a tourist attraction. The small house is about five miles from the Venice airport. They ask that the television not be hooked up. They pay $550 a month rent and they drive a 10-year-old car. Neither they nor any of the hijackers are known to have visited any mosque while in Florida. SPT 10/2/01, South Florida Sun-Sentinel 9/24/01
There are records online showing that ATTA and AL-SHEHHI both fly at Huffman on 7/6-8, 11-15, 17-18. ATTA flies on 7/19, but not AL-SHEHHI. Both fly 7/20. ATTA alone flies on 7/21-22. AL-SHEHHI flies on 7/23, but not ATTA. They both fly on 7/24-28. They both take 7/29 off from flying. They both fly every day from 7/30-8/3. AL-SHEHHI flies alone on 8/4. They both fly 8/6-7. ATTA alone flies on 8/8. ATTA/resources/documents/flightrecords.htm> Link
Summer 2000 A 58-year-old Muslim woman from Finland later claimed that around this time ATTA strikes up an Internet friendship with her which lasts about a year. After September 11th, she posts a death notice in a Helsinki newspaper. Link Given ATTAs absolute dead-seriousness at all times, it is hard to believe this report. Howver, she did use ATTAs El-Amir name in the obituary when it had not been publicly disclosed until several days after the attacks.
July 26, 2000BINALSHIBH wires an unspecified amount of money to AL-SHEHHI.
August 2000JARRAHs girlfriend Aysel Sengun visits JARRAHs family in Lebanon, telling them that JARRAH was in America and was too busy with his studies to join her. During this month, JARRAH makes the first attempt to enroll BINALSHIBH in his flight school in Florida.
Augsut 7, 2000--$9,485 is wired from the UAE into the ATTA-AL-SHEHHI joint account. There are indications that the money ultimately came from Al-Qaeda supporters in India. Link
August 14-15, 2000BINALSHIBH wires money from his account in Germany to that of a flight training school in Venice, Florida as a prepayment for flight lessons in the amount of $2,200 from his account at Citibank in Hamburg .
August 29, 2000In view of their status as trainee pilots, Huffman Aviation applies to the INS for M-1 student visas for ATTA and AL-SHEHHI. Link
August 30, 2000---$19,485 is wired from the UAE into the ATTA-AL-SHEHHI joint account.
September 2000ALMIDHAR/ALHAZMI are still living in the Parkwood Apartments. At the local mosque they meet AbdussATTAr Shaikh, a retired San Diego State University English professor and member of the local police commission, who lives in Lemon Grove in eastern San Diego County. Shaikh rents Nawaq ALHAZMI a room. Except for ALMIDHAR, Nawaq ALHAZMI appeared to have no friends at all. Nawaq ALHAZMI reads books on Islam and visits Arabic Internet sites. He follows a strict Muslim diet. He is never seen using a telephone. Both of them went out to make their phone calls. "He said he came here to learn English, but I didn't see him going to school very often. He told me he was taking English classes at a downtown language school." Nawaq ALHAZMI says he had applied for an extension on his student visa. He talks about eventually becoming a pilot. LAT 9/27/01 Shaikh helps ALHAZMI open an account at a Bank of America branch. Houston Chronicle 9/20/01
September 2000From Saudi Arabia, HANJOUR spends $110 to apply for another ESL course at the same school he had attended in 1996.
September 6, 2000MOUSSAOUI sets up an e-mail account with an ISP in Malaysia.
September 15, 2000BINALSHIBH makes his third application for a U.S. visa.
September 18, 2000---$69,985 is wired from the UAE into the ATTA-AL-SHEHHI joint account.
September 25, 2000BINALSHIBH wires an unspecified amount to AL-SHEHHIs account.
September 29, 2000MOUSSAUOI contacts Airman Flight School in Norman, OK using his Malaysian e-mail account.
September 30, 2000ESSABAR moves out of the Marienstrasse apartment.
October 2000BUDIMAN comes to the U.S. He lives in Maryland. BELFAS, another Al-Quds attendee, is with him. After 9/11 he passes an FBI lie-detector test in which he denied any foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
October 2000After sharing Nawaq ALHAZMIs room for about a month, ALMIDHAR leaves, telling their host that he was returning to Saudi Arabia where he had a wife and children, according to Shaikh. The departure coincides with the Cole bombing.
October 2000 MOUSSAOUI allegedly meets with Sufaat in Malaysia at this time. MOUSSAOUI receives $35,000 cash (which he later declared when entering the US), along with letters from Infocus Tech, a Malaysian company, stating that MOUSSAOUI had been appointed Infocus Techs marketing consultant in the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, and that he would receive, among other things, an allowance of $2500 per month. Infocus Tech is a real Malaysian company, and have said that MOUSSAOUI never worked for them. At this time, MOUSSAOUI starts to e-mail Airman Flight School in Norman, OKwhere ATTA and AL-SHEHHI had visited in Julyunder the name zuluman tangotango.
October 2000At the American consulate in Jeddah (where 10 hijackers would get their visas) HANJOUR obtains a student visa.
October 12, 2000 At Huffman Aviation, fellow flight student Anne Greaves sees the inseparable ATTA and AL-SHEHHI hugging and dancing in the computer room. At the time, she figures they had gotten some good news by e-mail. Later, she realizes that the men had been celebrating the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in the Middle East. This was the only time she ever saw them happypossibly the only time anyone has ever seen ATTA happy. Link Link If the FBI had mounted any kind of investigation, they would have been led to ALMIDHARs brother-in-law, whose phone number was called not only by ALMIDHAR but also by Bin Laden. For the atrocious and ultimately disastrous Cole investigation by the FBI, see Link
October 25, 2000BINALSHIBH makes his fourth and final application for a U.S. visa. He puts BUDIMANs Maryland address on the application but it is still denied, again.
November, 2000 JARRAH enrolls at the Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, FL. Thorsten Beirman, who flew with JARRAH, recalls: "He was not at all an aggressive person but when flying he seemed to change and he would brook no other opinions. I didn't feel safe and I decided that I would never fly with him again". JARRAH also tries to enroll BINALSHIBH at the school.
November 2000HANJOURs ESL class on the campus of Holy Names College begins, with no sign of HANJOUR. When the school calls its representative in Saudi Arabia who had handled his application, the person doesnt know what became of him.
November 2000ATTA and AL-SHEHHI finish their pilot training at Huffman, according to Rudi Dekkers, the owner. They receive their pilots licenses the following month, but their training at Huffman ends this month. Link
November 5, 2000The embassy of the UAE reports AL-SHEHHI missing with the Hamburg police. Shortly afterwards, his older brother comes to Hamburg to look for him unsuccessfully. Also that day, ATTA purchases flight-deck videos for Boeing 747 and 757 aircraft in a pilot store in Ohio. At some point he also buys life-size training posters of the cockpit of a Boeing 747 for $39.95 each. Link
Between November 27 and December 27, 2000AL-HAZNAWI returns to Saudi Arabia for Ramadan. He begins to talk to two distant cousins about the JihadAhmed and Hamza ALGHAMDI.
December, 2000JARRAH returns to Afghanistan at this time.
December 2000ALNAMI, Saeed ALGHAMDI, and the AL-SHEHRI brothers return from Afghanistan and boast about their training experiences in Afghanistan.
December 2, 2000BINALSHIBH travels to London, England, possibly to meet MOUSSAOUI.
Around December 6, 2000ATTA purchases more flight deck videos, this time for the Boeing 767 and the Airbus A320. Around this time, ATTA and other hijackers purchase an undisclosed number of global-positioning devices known as GPS-3s from Tropic-Aero, an aviation-supply shop in Fort Lauderdale.
December 8, 2000HANJOUR arrives in Cincinnati from Saudi Arabia. He is readmitted to the USA on an F-1 student visa on the pretense of the ESL course that he never attended. HANJOUR is therefore in illegal status from the moment he sets foot on American soil this time.
December 9. 2000 MOUSSAOUI flies from London to Pakistan, and presumably travels from there to Afghanistan for terror training, etc. He remains until February.
December 12, 2000ESSABAR makes his first attempt for a U.S. visa. It is denied. He also makes a bank transfer of 1,200 marks, about $560, to Binalshibh, presumably for his future American flight lessons. LAT 10/20/01
December 21, 2000ATTA and AL-SHEHHI receive their pilots licenses.
December 23, 2000BAHAJI asks Azzam Publications of London to send him their newsletter.
Late December 2000Witnesses later alleged that AL-SHEHHI throws a party with six or seven Arab friends at the Woodland Park Resort Hotel in Mabalacat, the Philippines. Link
December 27, 2000 [some sources say 26]ATTA and AL-SHEHHI fly a small rented private plane from Huffman Aviation to Miami International Airport. After a mechanical problem, they abandon the plane on a busy runway. An airport incident report indicates that the Piper Cherokee stalled at 5:45 p.m. and is removed from the taxiway by 6:20 p.m.
December 29-30, 2000ATTA and AL-SHEHHI train at a cost of $1500 on the Boeing 727 simulator belonging to Simcenter, Inc., at Opa-Locka Airport outside Miami. Each spends about 90 minutes per day on the simulator, which has controls similar to that of a 767. They seem more interested in simply flying the plane and doing turns than in takeoffs or landings. CT 9/17/01 The simulator has the topography of New York City stored in it. Its an absolute possibility that (the terrorists) went out and rented a simulator and practiced running into the World Trade Center. What we used to do when we had a couple of spare minutes in our training session, wed aim the airplane between the towers, or under the Golden Gate Bridge, a former commercial pilot said. San Francisco, London, L.A. and Hong Kong - theyre all replicated. The two men knew enough, a trainer said, to steer an airplane into a building. LAT 9/27/01
January 2001HANJOUR enrolls in yet another flight school, a Pan Am International facility called JetTech, at Deer Valley Airport in Phoenix. .HANJOURs English is so bad that the FAA is called (a total of three times in January and February) for advice. The instructors cant believe he has a pilots license.
January 2001Waleed AL-SHEHRI quits his teaching job and supposedly takes his brother Wail AL-SHEHRI to see an Islamic holy man to cure Wails unspecified mental illness. They are never seen in Saudi Arabia again. They do not appear again until they fly to America at the end of April. They are almost certainly in Afghanistan at this time.
January 2001The CIA learns that ALMIDHAR was involved in the planning of the USS Cole bombing. However, his name is not put on an immigration watchlist until the end of August, when he is in already in the U.S.
January 4, 2001ATTA flies to Madrid from Miami.
January 10, 2001 --ATTA returns to the U.S. at Miami and is sent to secondary inspection because he acknowledged being in flight training but did not have required trainee visa, and because he had overstayed his previous visa. After a 57-minute delay featuring questioning and a check of the Interagency Border Information System (IBIS) database, the second inspector clears ATTA into the country as a tourist, pending application for change to trainee status. Link
January 11, 2001AL-SHEHHI travels from Florida to Casablanca, Morocco.
January 18,2001AL-SHEHHI returns to New York from Casablanca, despite having overstayed his previous visa by five weeks.
January 28, 2001ESSABAR makes his second and final attempt for a U.S. visa. It is again denied.
January 30, 2001Flying west from Pakistan, JARRAH is detained and questioned in Dubai while he was changing planes after a two-month visit to Afghanistan. The detention was because his name figured on a "watch list" of suspected terrorists requested by the United States. An unnamed American intelligence agency requested the detention. But because he has a valid U.S. visa, they let him go. The CIA says that the U.S. was not informed about this incident until after September 11. Link, Link From Dubai he takes a KLM flight to Amsterdam and then returns briefly to Hamburg.
February 1, 2001ATTA and AL-SHEHHI rent a single-engine Piper Warrior from a Gwinett County, GA flight school, Advanced Aviation, adjacent to Briscoe Field in Lawrenceville. Around this time, they also join an L.A. Fitness Center in Decatur, Georgia. Link
There are possible sightings of ATTA and JARRAH in the Jacksonville, FL area at some point, according to the FBI. LAT 3/10/02
February 2001, approximatelyA man believed to be HANJOUR shows up at the San Diego Zoo with a briefcase containing cash and documents in Arabic. The case, apparently misplaced, is taken to the lost and found, according to officials at the zoo and FBI. A document identifying the apparent owner is found inside and a zoo official uses the public address system to reunite the owner with the case. A zoo security officer later told the FBI that she thought the man's name could have been Hani HANJOUR. She identified a photo of HANJOUR, shown to her by the FBI, as the man who picked up the case. LAT 10/5/01
February through May, 2001At various times during this period, ATTA and AL-SHEHHI are seen together in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, VA. There are vague stories that they took or investigated flight lessons in the area at this time with a man who left the area after September 11. .ATTA and AL-SHEHHI cash two checks at a SunTrust Bank branch in the Hilltop area of Virginia Beach. One check is for $8,000 and the other is for $10,000. They apparently stay at the oceanfront Colonial Inn Hotel. It is also believed that they visit the naval base in the area to examine possible targets. Link
February 2001Hamza ALGHAMDI, at the urging of AL-HAZNAWI, joins the jihad and disappears from Saudi Arabia. Around this time, Ahmed ALGHAMDIalso disappears, using the Red Crescent society to help pay for his trip to Afghanistan.
February 7, 2001MOUSSAOUI flies from Pakistan to London, England.
Around February 10-15, 2001JARRAH returns to Lebanon for the last time to be with his father during open-heart surgery.
February 15, 2001ATTA and AL-SHEHHI take another flight check ride at Advanced Aviation in Georgia.
Around February 20-25, 2001JARRAH returns to Florida from Germany PBP 10/15/01 The FBI contends that, not long after he returns to the USA, JARRAH flies to Las Vegas to meet with Lotfi Raissi, the Algerian pilot who helps train the hijackers. http://www.sptimes.com/News/101401/Worldandnation/He_seemed_like_such_a.shtml
Mid-to-late February 2001ATTA and AL-SHEHHI, now apparently established on the east coast of Florida, inquire with several other men about crop-dusting planes at South Florida Crop Care in Belle Glade. They pester employees at South Florida Crop Care for vital statistics about crop dusting planes. Dressed in collared shirts and Bermuda shorts, as if they had just walked off a golf course, ATTA and several other Middle Eastern men arrive the first time in a small plane. They want to know how much fuel the airplane held, and if it was hard to fly. They want to sit in the cockpit. They claim to be in flight school. At one point ATTA apparently walks into a U.S. Department of Agriculture office in Florida and asks about a loan to buy a crop-duster plane. The $500,000 plane that intrigues ATTA an Air Tractor AT-502 has a range of about 500 miles. Employees tell ATTA that the department does not offer such loans, and refer him to a local private lender. ATTA visits the bank and makes further inquiries about a crop-duster loan, but there is no record that he applied for one. South Florida Sun-Sentinel 9/24/01, Detroit News 9/25/01
February 22, 2001MOUSSAOUI e-mails Airman Flight School announcing that he would be arriving in America the next day.
February 23, 2001MOUSSAOUI flies from London to Chicago, arriving in the USA for the first time. He declares at least $35,000 cash on his Customs declaration. He takes a connecting flight to Oklahoma City and opens a bank account there at Arvest Bank in Norman. He deposits approximately $32,000 in cash. In America MOUSSAOUI behaves suspiciously from the start. He does not divulge his real name and uses pseudonyms.
February 26, 2001MOUSSAOUI enrolls in the Airman Flight School in Norman, OK. The enrollment process, normally ten minutes long, takes two hours because of MOUSSAOUIs reluctance to reveal anything about himself. MOUSSAOUI rents a second-floor apartment in a house close to the school for $300 a month. He drives an old Dodge Aries.
Late February 2001 ATTA, AL-SHEHHI and an instructor fly from Advanced Aviation in Lawrenceville, GA to Martin Campbell Airport in the mining town of Copperhill, TN, about 60 miles away.
February 28, 2001The last Muslim tenants suddenly move out of 54 Marienstrasse.. ATTA and AL-SHEHHI will soon arrive to clean the place out. Link
March 1, 2001MOUSSAOUI undergoes his physical at Airman. Around this time he also makes acquaintances at the local Norman mosque, though he berates most of them as not religious enough.
Early March 2001ATTA and AL-SHEHHI again fly from Gwinett County, GA to Copperhill, TNthis time without an instructor. ATTA starts grilling a pilot he sees there. ATTA asks about Boliden Intertrade, which produced sulfuric acid and sulfur dioxide until 2000, and also asks about the dam on the Hiwassee River, which runs between two nuclear plants.. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/548138/posts
ATTA asks: "So tell me about this factory I just flew over," referring to a former copper processing plant nearby, with dozens of round steel tanks and flanked by towering smokestacks. At the time, hundreds of rail tanker cars were parked near the plant. The plant's owners, Intertrade Holdings Inc., had recently stopped storing sulfuric acid and other hazardous chemicals in the tanks in preparation for closing the plant's acid manufacturing operation. "He was just persistent about the chemical company I told him the tanks were empty. He came back and said 'Don't tell me that. What about all the ... tanker cars?' This guy was just arrogant." ATTA also asks about the Ocoee River, about three miles from the plant. The Ocoee is a tributary of the Tennessee River, a major water source in the Southeast. A dam across the Ocoee near the plant forms a reservoir. to Several weeks later a man resembling ATTA drives to the airport in an expensive-looking sports car, this time asking about buying a plane. After a brief discussion he gets back in the car and leaves. Link
March 2001HANJOUR flunks out of Pan Am International. Around this timeHANJOURs final phone call to his family informs them that he is in the UAE , where he went to be a pilot.
Early MarchATTA and AL-SHEHHI come back to South Florida Crop Care in Belle Glade asking similar questions to those they asked before. Again, they want to sit inside the crop-duster. They ask: How much does it haul? How hard is it to fly?
March 11, 2001, ATTA and AL-SHEHHI return to Germany and clear out the Marienstrasse apartment.
Approximately mid-March 2001According to Al-Jazeera, AL-HAZNAWIs martyrdom video is recorded in Kandahar, Afghanistan at this time. It is high time we kill Americans in their home, he says in the video, in which his image is superimposed over a still photo of the Tower Two explosion. The video, entitled The Wills of the New York and Washington Battle Martyrs, is released on April 15, 2002.
Also approximately mid-March, 2001HANJOUR, Nawaq ALHAZMI, Ahmed ALGHAMDIand MOQED stay at the Fairfield Motor Inn in Fairfield, CT for four days. They meet with Eyad ALRABABAH, a Jordanian national living in Bridgeport, CT. It is believed that he supplies them with information on how to obtain fraudulent Virginia drivers licenses. For what they did with this information, see August 1-2. Link
Sometime in March 2001-- AL-SHEHHI and ATTA are seen at a highrise apartment on 130 Jameson Avenue in Toronto at this time, according to about a dozen residents of the building later interviewed by the RCMP. http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWSattack0112/20_torontolink_sun.html ATTA is seen at a print shop, Best Copy Printing, on Charles St. W in downtown Toronto, with Al-Qaeda operative Nabil Al-Marabh, whose uncle lives in the Jameson Ave. building and allegedly owns the shop. The print shops specialty, says the RCMP, is the production of fake IDs. A newspaper report says that forensic officers have found similarities between documents left behind by the hijackers and paper stock, laminates, and ink seized from the shop. The RCMP later discovered dozens of identification cards in various stages of assembly during raids at three Toronto addresses (the Jameson address and 190 Woolner Ave) and one in nearby Mississauga (121 Agnes St.). A stack of tightly controlled Canadian IMM-1000 forms, which are issued to landed immigrants to enter Canada, is also found. Link Link Neighbors later tell the RCMP there was a large picture of bin Laden on the wall in the shop. Toronto Sun 10/21/01
March-April, 2001Malek Mohamed SEIF would later admit to the FBI that he attended the same mosque and Phoenix flight school as HANJOUR at this time. HANJOUR goes back the Sawyer School in Phoenix, AZ for more training, paying $200 a month for unlimited use of a flight simulator. A Saudi national, Faisal al-Salmi, who trained with him, is convicted in Phoenix on February 15, 2002 of lying to the FBI about the case.
Sometime in March 2001HANJOUR and Salem ALHAZMI rent two rooms on the top floor of a building at 486 Union Avenue in Paterson, NJ. Up to six of the hijackers live there at one point or another. Saeed ALGHAMDI was known to stay there, as was Nawaq ALHAZMI. Neighbors remember ATTA as a frequent visitor. The room has no furniture. One of them has to ask a neighbor how to screw in a lightbulb. (WP 9/30/01) HANJOUR pays the rent each month in cash. In Fort Lee, N.J., Nawaq ALHAZMI and Salem ALHAZMI, maintain a box in a Mail Boxes Etc. store in the Linwood Plaza Mall.
March 25, 2001BAHAJIs wife gives birth to a son. BAHAJI posts a guard over his wife to prevent any hospital staff from seeing her and insists that she wear gloves whenever she handles the baby. BAHAJI also forbids her from photographing the child because he says it is against the Koran. LAT 9/22/01
April 1, 2001Nawaq ALHAZMI is ticketed for speeding and not wearing a seat belt while driving east on Interstate 40 in western Oklahoma towards the Oklahoma City area. The officer involved recorded that ALHAZMI has a valid California drivers license. He was driving the same blue Toyota that would be left in the Dulles parking lot on September 11th. It is believed that he was on his way to meet MOUSSAOUI. Link
April 8, 2001ATTA flies from Virginia Beach, VA to Prague, apparently using a false passport. Michael Isikoffs later debunking story concedes that car-rental records definitely indicate that ATTA was in Virginia Beach at this time. Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross says that a meeting took place between ATTA and Iraqi intelligence agent Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir AL-ANI in Prague. There are reports that this was the third or fourth meeting between ATTA and Al-Ani. Some sources later alleged that ATTA obtains anthrax from AL-ANI at this meeting. Czech intelligence officials have also indicated that, previously, AL-ANI also met with ALMIDHAR at some point. Link Newsweek 10/15/01 claims that this meeting was not with AL-ANI but with the more senior Farouk Hijazi, the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, who was called back to Baghdad before September 11. LinkLater, the story was officially debunked by Newsweeks Michael Isikoff on 4/28/02, though the first stories quoting unnamed officials saying that the meetings never took place appeared around 12/17/01. William Safire has refuted the Isikoff story pooh-poohing the Iraq/anthrax connection in two different columns. Link Link
According to Edward Jay Epstein, Al-Ani was not (as the New York Times called him) an "Iraqi Agent," he was an Iraqi case officer, that is, an intermediary between an agent and the state intelligence service controlling the agent. Epstein also claims that ATTA did not meet him at the Iraq consul, but at a discreet location in Prague. Link
Another unverified source says that senior U.S. intelligence sources say that in the spring of 2001, Marwan AL-SHEHRI and Ziad JARRAH met with known Iraqi intelligence agents outside the United States. David Rose, Focus Special: The Terrorism Crisis: The Iraqi Connection, The Observer, November 11, 2001.
Czech intelligence sources reported that al-Ani had been under surveillance because he had been observed apparently casing the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headquarters in Prague. Czech authorities believed the site had been selected for attack by terrorists. Patrick E. Tyler with John Tagliabue, Czechs Confirm Iraqi Agent Met With Terror Ringleader, The New York Times, October 27, 2001.
The intelligence sources further report that ATTA and al-Ani embraced upon meeting at Pragues Ruzyne airport, and that ATTAs may have visited the Czech capitol on four occasions. Daniel McGrory, Hijacker Given Flask by Iraqi Agent, The Times (London), October 27, 2001.
April 9, 2001ATTA returns to the USA.
April 12, 2001-- Using a Mail Boxes Etc. address in Hollywood, AL-SHEHHI gets his Florida drivers license. Link
April 13, 2001JARRAH re-enters the U.S. Details are not known.
April 20, 2001ATTA meets three Arabic-speaking men in Hamburg. Karl-Heinz Horst, a German taxi driver who recognized ATTA's face from television reports after Sept. 11, says he had driven the three passengers about 400 miles, from Fuerth, in southern Germany, to Hamburg in the north. During the long ride, one of the passengers says in English that he was a war veteran from Afghanistan. ATTA meet the taxi in Hamburg and pays the $500 bill in cash. At some point there is another ATTA meeting with EL-ATTAR in Neu-Ulm after which he takes a taxi all the way back to Hamburg in the middle of the night, paying with $700 cash. ATTAR later denies this story.
Around April 18, 2001AL-SHEHHI flies to Amsterdam, Holland.
April 22, 2001AL-ANI is expelled from the Czech Republic for conduct incompatible with his diplomatic status.
April 23, 2001JARRAH rents an efficiency apartment at the Bernard Apartments at 1816 Harding in Hollywood, Florida. JARRAH mostly paid on time, every week, in cash ($165). Chicago Tribune 9/17/01
April 26, 2001ATTA, driving a red 1986 Pontiac reportedly plastered with Arabic language stickers, is stopped for reckless driving in the 6800 block of Inverrary Boulevard.in Fort Lauderdale. He either did not have or did not show a driver's license, but nevertheless escaped with a warning, and a requirement that he appear in court at the end of May with a valid license. He gave his address as apartment 122 at 10001 West Atlantic Blvd. in Coral Springs. South Florida Sun-Sentinel 9/15/01
Between April 23, 2001 and June 29, 2001The original belief was that the thirteen assistants to the pilotEdward Jay Epstein calls them the Jeddah thirteen because all but one of them received their visas at the American consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabiaarrive in the USA for the first time: ALNAMI, AL-SUQAMI, MOQED, the ALSHEHRI brothers, Ahmed ALGHAMDI, Fayez AHMED/BANIHAMMAD, Salem ALHAZMI, Hamza ALGHAMDI, Mohand AL-SHEHRI, Saeed ALGHAMDI, and ALOMARI. But the sightings of Ahmed ALGHAMDIand MOQED in Connecticut in mid-March conflict with this belief. The government eventually admitted that six of this group entered the U.S. without any record of their entry. To list the ones we know about: Mohand AL-SHEHRI, Waleed AL-SHEHRI, Hamza ALGHAMDI, and ALNAMI enter the U.S. sometime in May; Saeed ALGHAMDI, ALOMARI, and Salem ALHAZMI enter the U.S. sometime in June
April 28, 2001 A German-speaking Arab man pays in advance for a room for Waleed AL-SHEHRI at the Bimini Motel on Ocean Drive, State Road A1A in Hollywood, FL. Walid AL-SHEHRIs drivers license uses the motels address (the Age 9/17/01) Other source says that Walid AL-SHEHRI actually moved in on this date. Link
May 2001MOTASSADEQ visits the Stade nuclear plant near Hamburg. Link
May 2001MOUSSAOUI joins a student gym at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK this month.
May 1, 2001 Waleed ALSHEHRI enters the U.S. on a tourist visa.
May 2, 2001AL-SHEHHI arrives at Miami International Airport on May 2 after approximately two weeks in Amsterdam, according to the Boston Globe. He is given permission to stay in the USA until November 2. He gives ATTAs 10001 W. Atlantic Blvd. address as his destination. Link
May 2, 2001Six days after ATTAs ticket. JARRAH obtains a Florida drivers license. So does ATTA the same day., though he never shows for the court appearance related to his April 26 ticket. AL-SHEHHI also gets a Florida drivers license around this time, listing a Mailboxes Etc. address. At some unspecified point this summer, ATTA and ALOMARI also get New Jersey drivers licenses. Some of the hijackers are also believed to somehow have North Carolina drivers licenses. Link In addition, all 19 hijackers have Social Security numbers, 13 of them legally. Link
We know that ALMIDHAR and Nawaq ALHAZMI received their SS#s in San Diego with the assistance of Mohdar ABDALLAH.
May 4, 2001 Waleed AL-SHEHRI gets his Florida drivers license, and a duplicate the next day. Link
May 6, 2001JARRAH walks into the U.S. 1 Fitness Center off the Federal Highway in Dania, outside Fort Lauderdale, FL. He signs up for private lessons with instructor Bert Rodriguez. He presents himself as a businessman who travels often and wants to be able to control somebody if he got into a fistfight. He trains for about 2 months, 2 or 3 times a week, an hour-to-and hour-and-a-half a day. Rodriguez concludes that JARRAH lacks toughness. LAT 9/27/01
May 12, 2001JARRAH registers a red 1990 Mitsubishi Eclipse.
May 13, 2001ATTA and AL-SHEHHI move into a shabby, $600-a-month apartment at 1808 Jackson Street in Hollywood, FL.
May 23, 2001MOUSSAOUI has nearly 57 hours of flying time, but still cannot fly solo and would have to pay more to continue at Airman. Looking for another option, he contacts an office of the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Miami, FL by e-mail. He says he wants to pilot one of these Big Bird After all we are in AMERICA, and everything is possble. [sic]
May 24, 2001, morningAL-SHEHHI takes a United Airlines flight from JFK Airport in New York. He travels first-class to San Francisco, where he boards a flight to Las Vegas. He rents a car from Enterprise. He spends the night at a Travelodge. LVR-J 10/31/01 http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Oct-31-Wed-2001/news/17340538.html The same source reported that JARRAH is also in Las Vegas around this time. LVR-J 9/28/01
May 25 and 26, 2001As the new hijackers arrive from Saudi Arabia, it is apparently entrusted to AL-SHEHHI to arrange housing. Through the spring and summer, he makes scores of cellphone calls to rental agents, motels, apartments, car-rental desks and the Palm Beach driver's-license office. On the two dates in question, while he is in Las Vegas, nearly 20 calls are placed from his cellphone to various real-estate owners and agents in and around Hollywood, Fla. Link
May 25, 2001AL-SHEHHI moves to a room at the St. Louis Manor at 2000 Paradise Road. He is visited by at least one Middle Eastern man while he is there.
May 27, 2001AL-SHEHHI checks out of the hotel and returns the rental car. Then for some reason he takes a flight back to San Francisco and from there flies first-class back to JFK. LVRJ 10/31/01
May 28, 2001 Mohand AL-SHEHRI, Hamza ALGHAMDI, and ALNAMI enter the U.S. on a flight from London using tourist visas.
May 28, 2001ATTAs court appearance for his April traffic stop is scheduled for 8:45 a.m. at the Broward County West Satellite Courthouse on Pine Island Road in Plantation. He does not show up. South Florida Sun-Sentinel 9/15/01
Around May 28, 2001Waleed AL-SHEHRI leaves the Bimini Motel. (Orlando Sentinel 9/15/01) along with one other hijacker, allegedly.
May 29, 2001MOUSSAOUI leaves the Airman Flight School without obtaining a pilots license. Witnesses report him piling everything he owns into a white Ford Taurus but apparently he remains in the Norman area until August. Link He vacates the room he has been staying in, but stays in Oklahoma City for two more months. MOUSSAOUI moves into an apartment with Mukarram ALI and Hussein al-ATTAS, both of whom were later detained by the FBI because of their contacts with MOUSSAOUI. (WP, 12/12/01).
May 31, 2001 AL-SHEHHI purchases a one-month membership Golds Gym in Hollywood, FL. But he only works out once in early June. AL-SHEHHI uses an alias and pays by credit card when signing up for the $70 membership. Link
June 2001Ahmed AL-HAZNAWI (93), having obtained a tourist visa in Saudi Arabia, enters the U.S. (Florida, presumably) on an unknown date in June 2001.
June 2001AL-SHEHHI and ATTA join a Jim Woolards World Gym in Delray Beach, and Wail M. AL-SHEHRI, Waleed M. AL-SHEHRI and Satam al-SUQAMI join another location at the corner of Hypoluxo Road and Congress Avenue in Boynton Beach. ATTA catches people's attention by wearing dress shirts and jeans while jerking weights around like a novice. ATTA is also a member at L.A. Fitness on University Drive in Coral Springs and works out at the upscale gym for about two months. All pay $60 cash for short-term memberships that last through July and August. Link Link
Around this time AHMED/BANIHAMMAD, Saeed ALGHAMDI, Hamza ALGHAMDI, Waleed ALSHEHRI, JARRAH, SUQAMI, Mohand ALSHEHRI (175), Ahmed ALNAMI (93) and Ahmed AL-HAZNAWI (93) each open a Florida SunTrust bank account with a cash deposit. At some point ALOMARI and ATTA rent two safety deposit boxes at a Miami Bank of America branch. The Age, 9/20/01.
Early JuneAL-SHEHHI and Saeed ALGHAMDI arrive at the Pelican Properties office of real estate agent Gloria Irish (whose husband Michael Irish is an editor at The Sun, a tabloid published by American Media) in Delray Beach, FL. They say that they need two apartments. AL-SHEHHI, she said, did all the talking, and ALGHAMDI glared at her, making her uncomfortable. AL-SHEHHI tells Mrs. Irish he was visiting the U.S. for pilot training. He and his friend were looking for three-month rentals near a gym. Within a couple of days, she finds the two visitors apartments in separate Delray Beach country-club communities. The men secure the properties with $6,000 in cash and even walk Mrs. Irish to the bank to deposit it. The hijackers often operated in complementary pairs: the jarring brusqueness of one canceled out by the affability of his partner.. notes a reporter. While apartment hunting, a glowering Alghamdi never speaks to Mrs. Irish, who concluded he was "a creep." The genial AL-SHEHHI apologizes that his friend doesn't speak English. "He was just the friendliest guy," Mrs. Irish says. He would greet her, she remembers, with a big smile and a warm, "Good morning, Gloria." (WP, 10/15/01).
Sometime in June 2001Nawaq ALHAZMI and HANJOUR reportedly rent a sedan from Borough Jeep Eagle Chrysler Plymouth in Wayne, N.J for $35 a day. This is the first of three vehicles rented by one or both of them this summer. One of the three is driven 1000 miles. They pay with a combination of cash, personal checks, and a MasterCard. The identification ALHAZMI uses is a Florida drivers license with a nonexistent address on Lindell Avenue in Delray Beach. HANJOUR reportedly signs the rental contract as Hani Saleh Hassan. Link Link
Also sometime in JuneNawaq ALHAZMI buys a one-way ticket at Apollo Travel in Paterson from New York to Miami. LAT 11/23/01
June 4, 2001A warrant is issued for ATTAs arrest for failure to appear in court, related to the 4/26 traffic stop.
Around June 8, 2001As arranged by Gloria Irish, Ahmed ALNAMI and Saeed ALGHAMDI rent Apartment 1504 at the Delray Racquet Club condominiums, 755 Dotterel Road, Delray Beach, FL. One neighbor recalled that the men often went swimming between 10 and 11 p.m., wearing swimsuits and carrying their briefcases to the pool. Hamza ALGHAMDImoves into a $900-a-month fifth-floor apartment in the same complex.
It could not be determined whether Irish ever told the two men that her husband was editor of the Sun there is no indication whether Irish or [future anthrax fatality] Stevens ever crossed paths with ATTA. (WP, 10/15/01) At one apartment complex in Delray Beach, Fla., two neighbors said they regularly heard odd, late-night "banging noises" coming from one of the suspects' apartments. "Like a hammer hitting metal," Randy Ferris recalled, "but you can't very well call the police for that. Believe me, I wish I had." Chicago Tribune, 9/17/01 Link
Around this time, there is at least one report that ATTA and AL-SHEHHI further their pilot instruction at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University near their new environs. But Embry-Riddle has never publicly confirmed or denied that the two hijackers had been at the school. (The Age, Australia, 9/14/01)
June 12, 2001AL-SHEHHI moves into a gated community in Delray Beach called the Hamlet Country Club, another rental arranged by Gloria Irish. Witnesses believe ATTA came along too. (ATTA is apparently there so much that neighbors believed they were living in the same apartment). The parking places for their cars--the red Pontiac and a Toyota--are next to hers, she said. On his rental application, AL-SHEHHI, when asked his permanent residence, writes: "NONE. I'm wandering." LAT 9/27/01
June 13, 2001ATTA moves into the Tara Garden condo at 10001 W. Atlantic Blvd. in Coral Springs, FL. This month he makes several phone calls to a Madrid telephone number.
June 19, 2001 AL-SHEHHI, having reported his first Florida drivers license lost, receives a duplicate license.
June 20, 2001MOUSSAOUI buys flight deck plans for the Boeing 747, Models 400 and 200, from the Ohio Pilot Store.
June 21, 2001Waleed AL-SHEHRI moves into Room B-308 of the Homing Inn on Federal Highway in Boynton Beach, FL, along with, it is believed, Wail AL-SHEHRI and AL-SUQAMI. The latter two would use the motel as their drivers license address. Link
June 22, 2001JARRAH leaves the Hollywood apartment and moves into another flat attached to a private home at 4641 Bouganvilla in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea for $200 a week. His roommate is AL-HAZNAWI . PBP 10/15/01 The landlord, Charles Lisa, notices that the skinny and frail AL-HAZNAWI has what appears to be an infected gash on his left leg. He directs the two men to nearby Holy Cross Hospital for treatment. Link
June 22 or 23, 2001, most likelyJARRAH accompanies AL-HAZNAWI to the emergency room of Holy Cross Hospital at 4725 N. Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale, FL, on an unspecified evening in June. They both used their own names, not aliases. AL-HAZNAWI had to be treated for a black lesion on his leg. Dr. Christos Tsonas cleaned the wound and prescribed the antibiotic Keflex. AL-HAZNAWI tells Tsonas a dark lesion he had on his leg had developed after bumping into a suitcase two months earlier. It later occurred to Tsonas that the lesion was consistent with cutaneous anthrax and he reported this information to the FBI in October 2001. The New York Times story that broke these details also mentioned that Holy Cross is relatively near the American Media building, where the first anthrax cases would be discovered. See Link
Summer 2001 For much of the summer, a group of four of the hijackers rent scooters by the hour from AAA Car Rental in Ft. Lauderdale. They killed time tooling up and down the city's famous beaches. Link
Summer 2001At some point this summer, HANJOUR is spotted with another man on a regular flight from Washington to California, undoubtedly as a dry run for Flight 77. HANJOUR+washington+california+summer&hl=en&ie=UTF8> Link
June 23, 2001HANJOUR reportedly trains at the Sawyer School of Aviation in Phoenix. According to the FBI, an Algerian pilot named Lotfi Riassi helps train him, though they later back away from this story Link
June 25, 2001AL-HAWSAWI opens a checking account at a Standard Chartered Bank branch in Dubai, UAE, with a cash deposit. The same day, Fayez AHMED/BANIHAMMAD (175) has a savings account and a checking account opened for him at the same Standard Chartered Bank branch. The MOUSSAOUI indictment is not clear on whether AHMED/BANIHAMMAD opens the account in person, or if hes already in the USA and AL-HAWSAWI is using a power of attorney.
June 27, 2001, approximatelyJARRAH travels to Las Vegas around this time. On the car rental form at Payless Car Rental, he lists Circus Circus, 2880 Las Vegas Blvd., as his destination hotel.
June 27, 2001Hamza ALGHAMDI, living at the Delray Beach Racquet Club, gets his Florida drivers license; later, he receives two duplicates, the latest in August.
June 28, 2001 ATTA flies into McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. He rents a Chevrolet Malibu from an Alamo Rent-a-Car. It is not known where he stays this first night.
June 29, 2001The tall, slim ALOMARI and the apelike Salem ALHAZMI arrive together at Kennedy Airport on a Swissair flight from London. It is believed that ALOMARI stays at ATTAs Coral Springs condominium. They are the final two hijackers to arrive in the USA. NYT 11/6/01
June 29, 2001Ever frugal, ATTA moves into Room 122 at the Econo Lodge at 1150 S. Las Vegas Blvd. Making sure he gets the 10% AAA discount, ATTA pays $49.50 a night in cash. He uses his Florida drivers license as ID. Investigators believe that he met with HANJOUR, AL-SHEHHI, and JARRAH in this trip. Several change planes in Denver during this and the next Vegas trip. http://www.thedenverchannel.com/den/news/stories/news-101732420011016-071016.html There are some reports that AL-SHEHHI visits the Olympic Garden strip club at 1531 Las Vegas Blvd. during this trip. They order a takeout The Works pizza without ham from Hungry Howies pizza parlor at Vegas and Buffalo Drives. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/536870/posts http://extratv.warnerbros.com/reframe.html?http://extratv.warnerbros.com/dailynews/extra/10_01/10_19a.html They meet at least once at a Starbucks at 1340 E. Flamingo Road, near UNLV. Most interesting, several hijackers visit the Cyber Zone store at 4440 S. Maryland Parkway. A Cyber Zone employee told the Review-Journal he believed JARRAH and ATTA visited the store. The employee said he believed ATTA used computers to visit Web sites. Employees of the West Charleston Library have told the FBI that terrorists who visited Las Vegas may also have visited the library, though the FBI doubts it. LVRJ 10/10/01 There is one report in the Las Vegas Sun 9/20/01 that one of ATTAs two Vegas car rentals this summer is returned with more than 1000 miles on it.
June 29, 2001Using the Dotterel Road address in Delray Beach, ALNAMI gets a Florida drivers license. Link
July, 2001Sometime this month, someone named Mohamed ATTA uses a bad credit card at the Government Printing Office in Washington to try to purchase the official Air Force magazine, giving an address in Egypt. ATTA26.html>Link
July 2001There is an unsubstantiated report according to USNWR in their 5/6/02 issue that two unspecified hijackers met in an Oklahoma City motel with MOUSSAOUI.
July 1, 2001ATTA departs from Las Vegas. He flies first to Newark and goes to Paterson, NJ, where he buys his July 7 ticket from Florida to Madrid from Apollo International Travel on Main Street, paying $550 cash for a one-way fare. SPT 10/18/01 Within two days he is back in Florida.
Around this time, says the LA Times, ATTA, AL-SHEHHI and HANJOURall make brief, separate, trips abroad. The only one whose itinerary is publicly known (mostly) is ATTAs Madrid trip.. LAT9/27/01
July 3, 2001Both Wail AL-SHEHRI and al-SUQAMI receive Florida drivers licenses using the Homing Inn address. Link
July 4, 2001ALHAZMI (77-5) and ALMIDHAR (77-2) arrive at LAX on B-1 business visa after a flights from abroad. ALMIDHAR is on Saudi Arabia Airlines Flight 53 from Riyadh. Both use different Saudi passports than they used before. They arrive together. AL-HAZMI give Marriott in New York City as his destination. ALMIDHAR leaves the address portion of his I-94 incomplete, yet the business visa ALMIDHAR obtained at the consulate in Jedda allows him to stay in the country until October 3.Time, 11/1/01.
July 5, 2001ATTA is stopped again for speeding, in Delray Beach, FL. He now had the Florida driver's license, and the policeman's computer check did not reveal that a bench warrant was outstanding for ATTA for failure to appear in court related to his April 26 speeding ticket.
July 7, 2001ATTA boards a Swissair jet at Miami International Airport, bound for Madrid.
July 8, 2001, morningRather than flying non-stop from Miami to Spain, ATTA goes out of his way to change planes in Zurich. According to the Swiss Federal Police, during his 2 1/2-hour layover in Zurich, ATTA withdraws about $1,000 in Swiss francs from an airport cash machine. ATTA's purchases at the airport--two Swiss Army knives and some chocolate--are paid for with a credit card, not with cash. Swiss francs would have been useless in Spain, raising the possibility that ATTA may have given the money to someone he met at the Zurich airport. At least one of the other hijackers, Salem ALHAZMI, flies from Zurich to New York a few days before ATTA stopped there. Link According to at least one source, AL-SHEHHI is with ATTA. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-worldtrade-suspectprofiles.story There was an early incorrect report that he and AL-SHEHHI spent the night at a hotel in the Zurich area but this does not appear to be correctthe stopover in Zurich was only for a few hours at most.
July 8, 2001, afternoonATTA flies into Barajas Airport in Madrid. He rents a car that hed previously reserved over the Internet.. According to one report in a Spanish newspaper, ATTA meets AL-SHEHHI and they spend the night at the Diana Cazadora, a three-star hotel about 500 metres - five minutes by car - from Barajas airport on the Barcelona road. ATTA and his colleague have dinner together and then allegedly drink vodka for a time in the hotel bar. Link Some believe that ATTAs trip to Spain was prompted by the June 22 arrest of Mohammed Bensakhria, chief of a terror cell in Frankfurt, Germany. Bensakhria had been hiding in Spain since a Christmas plot to bomb a Strasbourg, France, market was exposed and thwarted. Spanish police believed that the trip had to have been vitally important if ATTA took time off from his planning for the 9/11 attacks to come to a meeting that had to be held face-to-face for maximum security. LAT 11/23/01 Apparently BINALSHIBH was in Spain at this time, also, so there was undoubtedly some 9/11 discussion. Link
There is also one report that ATTA makes a side journey to Rome on this trip. Italian security sources have reported that Iraq made use of its Rome embassy to foster and cultivate Husseins partnership with al-Qaeda. Habib Faris Abdullah al-Mamouri, a general in the Iraqi secret service, and from 1982 to 1990 a member of the Special Operations Branch, (M-8) charged with developing links with Islamist militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Gulf states, was stationed in Rome as an instructor for Iraqi diplomats. Al-Mamouri supposedly met with ATTA in Hamburg and Prague in addition to Julys visit in Rome. Al-Mamouri has not been seen in Rome since July, shortly after he last met ATTA. [Daniel McGrory, Hijacker Given Flask by Iraqi Agent, The Times (London), October 27, 2001.]
July 10-11, 2001MOUSSAOUI makes credit card payments to the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Miami for a simulator course in commercial flight training.
July 12, 2001In a one-page interview in Pravda entitled The Dollar and America Will Fall Down on August 19, Russian economist Tatyana Koryagina predicts an attack on American financial institutions by unnamed international groups with mystical and religious components on August 19. The U.S. has been chosen as the object of financial attack because the financial center of the planet is located there. The effect will be maximal. The strike waves of economic crisis will spread over the planet instantly, and will remind us of the blast of a huge nuclear bomb. Some fluctuation in this date is possible. Serious forces are acting against those who are now preparing the attack on the United States. August, with very high probability, will bring the financial catastrophe to the U.S.... The last 10 days of August have especial importance from a religious-sensible point of view. Link
Mid-July 2001An FBI agent in Arizona writes a multi-page memo to FBI headquarters laying out information developed by his counterterrorism team has developed in an unrelated investigation, pointing out that a number of Middle Eastern nationals were training at Arizona flight schools. WP 5/3/02
July 14, 2001It is believed that ATTA goes to the town of Tarragona, and tries unsuccessfully to visit Jague Cristian Homarin, an Algerian held in federal prison there on murder charges, officials said.. Link There is also a sighting at Port Aventura theme park inTarragona per La Vanguardia.
July 16, 2001A Spanish newspaper has reported an uncorroborated sighting that ATTA met with Wail and Waleed AL-SHEHRI on this day. Link
July 17. 2001 ATTA drives to the town of Salou. He stays at the Hotel Casablanca Playa for $32 a night. He meets another man, and a woman. According to Spanish newspaper accounts, the woman is believed to be a former girlfriend of MOUSSAOUI. Link He spends one night at the Casablanca Playa, and then checks out and moves to another hotel in the same town. Some believe he is meeting with alleged Al-Qaeda financier Ahmed Brahim at his luxury flat at Paseo Maritimo in the Barcelona area, which Brahim sells immediately after ATTAs visit. Link
July 17, 2001The INS approves ATTAs student visa. The visa is not delivered to Huffman Aviation until March 11, 2002, long after the attacks. Link
July 18, 2001Fayez AHMED/BANIHAMMAD gives power of attorney to Mustafa Ahmed AL-HAWSAWI for AHMED/BANIHAMMADs Standard Chartered Bank accounts in the UAE. On the same day, AL-HAWSAWI picks up AHMED/BANIHAMMAD (175)s Visa and ATM cards in the UAE. Shortly after, AL-HAWSAWI ships them to Fayez AHMED/BANIHAMMAD in Florida.[apparentlythe MOUSSAOUI indictment is a little unclear on this] Time Magazine has reported that the hijackers' credit cards are through the Dime Savings Bank of New York.. Link
July 18, 2001 ATTA spends his last night in Spain in Room 15 at a different hotel, the Montsant Hotel in Salou, where he pays the bill ($27) with his Visa card and registers under his own name and uses his own Egyptian passport. He leaves and returns to the hotel several times during the evening. Link
Italian anti-terrorist police have mentioned that Ben Khemais, from the terrorist cell in Milan, Italy, travels to Spain at about the same time ATTA was there. ATTA+taxi+Hamburg&hl=en> Link
July 19, 2001 ATTA returns his rental car with 2000 kilometers (1250 miles) on it. The mileage would have been enough for the trip to Salou plus an additional trip to the coastal cities of Alicante and Valencia, which have active Al-Qaeda cells at the time. ATTA uses a public Internet terminal at Madrid Airport to send e-mails before he boards the plane to Atlanta. ATTA arrives at Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta and is given permission to stay until November 2, 2001.
Starting sometime around the latter half of July, 2001Per James Lester, an employee of South Florida Crop Care in Belle Glade, ATTA was among the Arab men who in groups of two or three visited the crop dusting firm nearly every weekend for six or eight weeks before the attacks. ATTA is a persistent questioner and "I recognized him because he stayed on my feet all the time. I just about had to push him away from me," Lester said. Link
July and August 2001ATTA repeatedly visits the Shipping Post, a mom-and-pop mailing business in Punta Gorda, Fla., to obtain money orders in amounts of $100 to $200, according to the owner. Link
Late July 2001ATTA receives two calls from a number in Madrid. Link
July 25, 2001JARRAH flies from the U.S. to Germany.
June or July 2001There are two witnesses from TUHH in Hamburg, Germany who say that they saw ATTA and AL-SHEHHI at this time in the ground-floor workshops of the architecture department on at least two occasions with a scale model, measuring about 3 square, of what appeared to be the Pentagon. After September 11, it was discovered that TUHHs librarya short distance from the workshop in questionwas missing between 60 and 80 slides of the World Trade Center and the Sears Tower in Chicago. This tantalizing report is difficult to work into the timeline except in early June or, more likely, late July, coinciding with JARRAHs visit. Link
July 26, 2001SUQAMI and Waleed and Wail AL-SHEHRI move out of the Homing Inn. South Florida Sun Sentinel 9/28/01
Late July, 2001-- MOQED is seen at the Adult Lingerie Center, an adult video store in Beltsville, MD. He visits two more times, all between 10:30 PM and 1:30 AM, for about ten minutes each time. Newsday 9/23//01
The latter part of July, 2001 Nawaq ALHAZMI rents a minivan (presumably the one they used to drive to Virginia to obtain the phony licenses, see August 1-2) for $60 a day.
July 29-August 2, 2001From public telephones in Norman, OK, MOUSSAOUI makes several phone calls to a number in Duesseldorf, Germany.
July 29, 2001HANJOUR leaves the Sawyer School. Link
July 30-31, 2001BINALSHIBH, using the name Ahad Sabet, receives two wire transfers, totaling approximately $15,000, from Hashim Abdulrahim in the UAE.(MOUSSAOUI indictment)
August 1, 2001Actor James Woods, taking American Airlines