Egypt’s Lost Son: Mohamed el-Amir el-Sayyed Atta
The birth of a son, a student and unsuspectingly, a terrorist. Egypt, rich with history that traces back thousands of years, is also home to some of the more notorious fundamentalist sects in the world. Where astute authors of world history and religion came to study and bear witness to it’s illustrious tourist sites, the pharaohs of Egypt with the great Sphinxes guarding their tombs. It is also home to the birth of an alleged co-conspirator behind the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks, but who was he really?
Mohamed el-Amir el-Sayyed Atta was born in Kafr El Governate, Egypt on September 1st 1968. Atta lived with his mother Bouthayna Mohamed Mustapha Sheraqi and father Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta. His parents weren’t very religious, but were quite modest in their daily life with his father being a well respected lawyer in Cairo. Mohamed was known as a very quiet but affable young man who was shy when it came to girls. Mohamed was very attentive when it came to his studies however. And by 1990 the young Atta took courses in architecture, and excelled well. It was here Mohamed Atta joins what is called an “engineering syndicate,” a professional or trade group. Like the school that trained many of its engineers, the syndicate serves as an unofficial base for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, where the organization recruits new operatives and spreads its ideology. The Muslim Brotherhood during this period had begun to implement new strategies to implement the Islamic faith, here in this document called “General Strategic Goal For The Group In North America” dated (5–22–1991):
https://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/20.pdf
From here Mohamed Atta enrolls in the planning program of the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany. Atta chose Hamburg after meeting two German school teachers from there in the fall of 1991. The teachers were in Cairo because and organized student exchanges between Germany and Egypt. After being introduced by mutual friends, they offered Atta a rent-free room in their home, where he stays for about six months, before moving into student housing. He would grow fond of the department’s chairman, Dittmar Machule, who was a specialist in Middle East Affairs. Maschule would describe Atta as “tender, sensitive… he had deep, dark eyes. His eyes would speak.You could see the intelligence, the knowledge, the alertness.” But Atta began other studies outside of his technical abilities, and thus after his days at the university would end as he would frequent a nearby mosque.
It was here that a radical Moroccan imam, Mohammed Fazazi, would give weekly sermons at the Al-Quds mosque in Hamburg, Germany, which is attended by by future 9/11 hijackers and plotters Marwan Al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Fazazi, who also makes videotapes that are watched by Islamist radicals throughout Europe, strongly believes that democracy and Western values must be rejected by Muslims living in the West, who should respect only their own Koranic laws. He often preaches that European countries are conducting a war against Islam and that “smiting the head of the infidels” is the duty of all Muslims, mandated by God.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64793-2002Sep10.html
Mohamed would travel back to his hometown in Cairo periodically. In a three-month trip in 1995, Atta demonstrates that he is still a member of an engineering syndicate linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. He takes two Germans students he is traveling with, Volker Hauth and Ralph Bodenstein, to the syndicate’s eating club. According to Hauth, Atta does nothing during the trip which suggests he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the group’s influence on the club is obvious. According to German author, Jurgen Roth, described by Newsday as “one of Germany’s top investigative reporters,” in this year the BKA (the German Federal Office for criminal investigations) investigates Atta for petty drug crimes and falsifying phone cards whilst he is a student at the Technical University at Hamburg-Harburg.
While he isn’t charged, a record of the investigation will prevent him from getting a security job with Lufthansa Airlines in early 2001. Also around 1995, Atta registers as a UAE citizen, This will be confirmed after 9/11 by Hamburg’s interior minister, Olaf Scholz, who will say that his UAE nationality was recorded in the Ausländerzentralregister, a federal data base with personal data of foreign residents and asylum seekers. Atta would seemingly start to lead two lives, while starting to get noticed by German Intelligence.
It is unclear how or why Atta registered as a UAE national however. In addition, throughout most of his time in Germany, Atta is registered under a name variant, Mohamed el-Amir, and only registers using his full name after obtaining a new passport. In 1996 Atta would start to become very well known in the Al-Quds mosque to the regular members there as well as other mosques in the Hamburg area. After a time, Atta begins to teach classes at the mosque. He is stern with his students and criticizes them for wearing their hair in ponytails and gold chains around their necks, as well as for listening to music, which he says is a product of the devil. If a woman shows up, her father is informed she is not welcome.
His slow radicalization was starting to become apparent. Very few attendees would be left at the end listening to the strict Atta, some of those members were Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Said Bahaji, and Mounir El Motassadeq. There were two other men who were keeping their eye in Atta and the group, Syrian-born al-Qaeda operatives Mamoun Darkazanli and Mohammed Haydar Zammar. Darkanali and Zammar would become the motivators for the strict “religious” sect, later to be called “the Hamburg Cell”, in regards to their vitriol for the West and their Salafi beliefs.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2003/faz020203.html
On April 11, 1996, Mohamed Atta makes his will. Although the act of making a will is not that unusual for a 27-year old Muslim, the content of the will is unusual, perhaps reflecting the radical environment of the mosque. His will is often seen as bizarre but completely written with religious overtones according to his Islamic faith. For example, it says:
“…I don’t want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean to come and say good bye to me because I don’t approve it…The person who will wash my body near my genitals must wear gloves on his hands so he won’t touch my genitals… I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter.”
The will is witnessed by Abdelghani Mouzdi and Mounir El Motassadeq, who also make wills around the same time. Mohamed Atta’s will can be read here:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/network/personal/attawill.html
By the spring of 1997 Mohamed Atta, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and two of their associates, Mohammed Haydar Zammar and Mohammed Bin Nasser Belfas, find employment at a small Hamburg-area computer company called Hay Computing Service GmbH. Atta and Belfas got their jobs through Agus Budiman, an Indonesian associate of theirs, who was already employed at the company. They would be seen as diligent workers at the company, and basically kept to themselves away from the co-workers who weren’t affiliated with the mosque. Months later, Atta along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh would travel to Afghanistan, where it was reported they would meet with other Al Qaeda operatives and start training at the Kandahar training camp. When Atta returns in the spring of 1998 he tells his roommate that he has been on another pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca.
This is Atta’s longest absence since arriving in Hamburg, and there is no record of him spending any substantial portion of it at home in Cairo. After returning to Germany, Atta applies for a new passport, something he will also do after returning from Afghanistan in early 2000. It was also asserted from Air Force spokesman Colonel Ken McClellan in 1997, that a “Mohamed Atta had once attended the International Officer’s School at Maxwell/Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.” But he adds that “there was discrepancies in the biographical data”. At the International Officers School it was claimed Atta would engage in learning aircraft which were pilot-less, Global Hawk is a technology that enables pilot-less flight and has been functioning since at least early 1997.
In 1998, thieves snatch a passport from a car driven by a US tourist in Barcelona, Spain, which later finds its way into the hands of would-be hijacker Ramzi Bin al-Shibh. Bin al-Shibh allegedly uses the name on the passport in the summer of 2001 as he wires money to pay flight school tuition for Zacarias Moussaoui in Oklahoma. After 9/11, investigators will believe the movement of this passport shows connections between the 9/11 plotters in Germany and a support network in Spain, made up mostly by ethnic Syrians. “Investigators believe that the Syrians served as deep-cover mentors, recruiters, financiers and logistics providers for the hijackers — elite backup for an elite attack team.” Mamoun Darkazanli, one of the mentors to Atta, had connections in Aleppo,Syria, which was his place of birth. The connection however is redacted by German intelligence and the CIA never mentions this in any of their field reports. Or were they acknowledge and covered up?
http://articles.latimes.com/2003/jan/14/world/fg-syrians14
Meanwhile, Mohamed Atta, Said Bahaji and Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, and others in the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell move into a four bedroom apartment at 54 Marienstrasse, in Hamburg, Germany. Some of them stay there until February of 2001. Investigators will later believe this move marks the formation of the Hamburg cell. During the 28 months Atta’s name is on the apartment lease, 29 Middle Eastern or North African men register the apartment as their home address. German intelligence monitors the apartment off and on for months, and wiretaps Mounir El Motassadeq, an associate who will later be convicted for assisting the 9/11 plot, but apparently it does not find any indication of suspicious activity. The CIA also allegedly starts monitoring Atta in early 2000 while he is living at the apartment, and does not tell Germany of the surveillance.
Atta leaves Germany to live in the US in June 2000. German officials will later claim that the apartment itself is never bugged. An unnamed senior German security official will later say that some surveillance of associated people gives “the impression that the people living there were fanatical believers. At the BfV [Germany’s domestic intelligence agency], we had to decide whether to ask permission to place a wiretap on the line at 54 Marienstrasse itself. We discussed this every day.” But he will also claim that they ultimately decide they would not be able to get legal permission for a wiretap because there is no evidence that the apartment occupants are breaking any laws.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/path-to-9-11-200411
Around 1999, Mohamed Atta would meet with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a high ranking Al Qaeda operative who was involved in many nefarious operations including financing terrorist plots such as Bojinka Plot. He would also meet with Ramzi bin al-Shibh at this time. Mohamed Atta is regularly attending Islamic study group meetings led by a fellow Hamburg student named Mohammed bin Nasser Belfas. By this time, Atta and most of the group have replaced their Western jeans and clean-shaven faces with long beards and tunics. After one of these meetings, Atta asks to privately see Volker Harum Bruhn, an ethnic German who is also a member of the group.
Bruhn says that Atta strongly warns him to stay away from Islamic extremists, to follow the Koran strictly, and live a careful life. According to German investigations, by at least this time, the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell including Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh have come up with the idea of attacking the United States by using airplanes and crashing them into high valued targets. This theory is based on witness statements and the discovery by the German police of a flight simulator file on a computer used by the Hamburg cell that was downloaded between January and October 1999.
Both Atta and al-Shehhi start taking lessons on ultralight aircraft this year. In April of 1999, Mohamed Atta takes flying lessons in the Philippines, and 9/11 hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi is with him. They stay at the Woodland Park Resort Hotel near Angeles City, which is about 60 miles north of Manila and near the formerly U.S controlled Clark Air Base. Victoria Brocoy, a chambermaid at the hotel, will later claim that Atta stayed at the hotel for about a week while he learned to fly ultra-light planes at the nearby Angeles City Flying Club. The Philippine military will later confirm that Atta and al-Shehhi were at the hotel after finding four other employees who claim to have seen them in 1999. Other locals, such as the manager of a nearby restaurant, also recall seeing them.
Huffman Aviation, the Venice, Florida flight school later attended by Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, is sold to Naples-based flight school Ambassador Airways, which is owned by Wally Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers. Huffman Aviation is just up the road from Florida Flight Training Center, where Ziad Jarrah, the alleged pilot of Flight 93, will begin flying lessons in summer 2000. Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, plus would-be hijacker Ramzi Bin al-Shibh and associate Mounir El Motassadeq, hold a meeting in Amsterdam, Netherlands. On at least one occasion, Motassadeq receives cash provided by unnamed “Saudi financiers” that is meant to fund a new Eindhoven mosque. Investigators believe he uses the money to help pay for some flying lessons. In October 1999 Mohamed Atta enters a lottery for permanent resident status in the United States.
The application is submitted over the Internet to the National Visa Service, a company that, for a $50 fee, helps individuals enter green card lotteries for permanent resident status in the U.S. Atta submits another lottery application in November, but both applications are unsuccessful. In December 1999, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi are seen again in the Philippines, partying and taking flying lessons. They stay at the Woodland Park Resort Hotel. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is also known to be in the Philippines for much of 1999, plotting again to assassinate the Pope which were unsuccessful in the planning stages. Atta went to the nearby Angeles City Flying Club about two of three times a week to train on ultralight aircraft.
Atta and al-Shehhi, who were at the resort earlier in the year, yet no one recalls al-Shehhi taking flying lessons, only Atta. After this trip, Atta and al-Shehhi travel to Kandahar, Afghanistan to meet with Ziad Jarrah, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi report their passports missing with Jarrah reporting his missing in February 2000. They returned to Florida after the meeting in Afghanistan. The Congressional Joint Inquiry will later find that several of the hijackers, including Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, attend mosques in the U.S and that at least one of the mosques is located in Florida. The Florida mosque attended by Atta and al-Shehhi is the Al Hijrah mosque run by Gulshair Shukrijumah in Miramar, Broward County, Florida. Atta and several other hijackers live near the mosque and train at nearby Opa-Locka airport, while Shukrijumah is receiving money from the Saudi embassy in Washington at this time. Was some of that funding being received by the Hamburg Cell to pat for lessons at Opa-Locka?
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=15735
May of 2000, Mohamed Atta is put under surveillance by the CIA while living in Germany during this time. He is “reportedly observed buying large quantities of chemicals in Frankfurt, apparently for the production of explosives [and/or] for biological warfare.” “The CIA reported to have trailed Atta and have admitted to have failed to inform the German authorities about their investigation,” even as the Germans are investigating many of his associates.
“The disclosure that Atta was being trailed by police long before September 11th raises the question why the attacks could not have been prevented with the man’s arrest.”
A German intelligence official also states, “We can no longer exclude the possibility that the Americans wanted to keep an eye on Atta after his entry in the US.” A US Army intelligence program called Able Danger identifies five al-Qaeda terrorist cells; one of them has connections to Brooklyn, New York and will become informally known as the “Brooklyn” cell by the Able Danger team.
This cell includes 9/11 hijacker leader Mohamed Atta, and three other 9/11 hijackers: Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, and Nawaf al-Hazmi. According to a former intelligence officer, Anthony Shaffer, who worked closely with Able Danger, the link to Brooklyn is not based upon any firm evidence, but computer analysis established patterns in links between the four men. “The software put them all together in Brooklyn.” James D. Smith, a contractor working with the unit, discovers Mohamed Atta’s link to al-Qaeda. Smith had been employing advanced computer software and analyzing individuals who are going between mosques frequented by the cells which made a link between Mohamed Atta and Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, the alleged ringleader of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and Landmarks Plot.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/08/28/third-source-backs-able-danger-claims-about-atta.html
During the summer of 2000, anonymous government sources later claim that Mohamed Atta visits fellow hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, and Omar al-Bayoumi. These same sources claim al-Bayoumi is identified after September 11 as an “advance man” for al-Qaeda. between June 28 to 30, 2000, there are over a dozen calls from Atta’s cell phone in New York to the home phone of an accomplished Al Qaeda financier, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (a.k.a. Ammar al-Baluchi) in the United Arab Emirates. Ali is also the nephew Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
On June 29, Ali sends $5,000 to Marwan al-Shehhi in the U.S, and more money from Ali to the future hijackers follows over the next few months. Some of the 9/11 suspects open bank accounts in Florida around the time they start flight training there. Ziad Jarrah opens an account at the First Florida National Bank with a $2,000 deposit and, nine days later, hijacker pilots Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi open a joint account at SunTrust Bank in Venice, Florida.
On July 3rd 2000, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi move from New York to Venice, Florida. They arrive at Huffman Aviation, a flying school at Venice Municipal Airport, on July 1, according to the school’s owner Rudi Dekkers, they inquired about taking lessons there. Atta will give $18,703.50 in total for his lessons, while al-Shehhi gives $20,917.63. The money necessary to cover their training is sent to them in a series of transfers from Dubai of the United Arab Emirates. While Atta and al-Shehhi attend Huffman Aviation, Ziad Jarrah, is taking lessons at a flight school just down the road from them, at the Florida Flight Training Center which is operated by manager, Arne Kruithof.
According to official accounts, Atta and al-Shehhi complete their schooling at Huffman on December 19, 2000, when they take their commercial pilot license tests. Rudi Dekkers says that after returning to the school to settle their bills, they leave and are never seen there again. In December of 2000, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi are living with FBI informer Abdussattar Shaikh in San Diego and they are apparently visited frequently by Mohamed Atta, as well as Hani Hanjour, according to neighbors who were interviewed after September 11th 2001 by the FBI.
While attending flight school in Venice, Florida, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi regularly visit a couple of the local bars. Most nights, after flying classes, they drink beer at the Outlook. They are observed there as being neatly dressed and well spoken. Atta comes across as cold and unfriendly, and is disapproving of the presence of women servers behind the bar. Veteran British intelligence officer Colonel John Hughes-Wilson will note that, at the same time as Atta and al-Shehhi are learning to fly at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida “A CIA front company called Air Caribe was also operating out of the very same hangar at Venice airport.”
He will go on to comment that “this highly curious coincidence must inevitably raise some suspicions of just how much the CIA really did know before 9/11. Was the CIA trying to infiltrate and ‘double’ the US-based al-Qaeda cell, in the hope of using it against Osama bin Laden’s organization in the future?” The Air Caribe story is originally broken by investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker, who will publish a book about Atta’s time in Florida in 2004 entitled “Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9–11 Cover-up in Florida”.
http://www.madcowprod.com/2006/02/21/the-secret-history-of-mohamed-atta/
According to a 2002 FBI document regarding the 9/11 attacks, Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Waleed al-Shehri are seen flying small aircraft at an airport in Oklahoma, Zacarias Moussaoui is also there at the same time. The document notes that “several employees” at Million Air, located at Wiley Post Airport in Bethany, Oklahoma, see Atta, al-Shehhi, and al-Shehri on the same Beechcraft Duchess aircraft all at the same time. Furthermore, Moussaoui is seen there in the same time-frame, although the FBI report will not mention if Moussaoui is ever seen with the other three. The employees cannot give exact dates when these people are seen, but all the visits are in the six months leading up to 9/11 and two visits are said to take place after August 4, 2001.
Also in the summer months of 2001, Atta and al-Shehhi reportedly spend at least 30 minutes practicing landing a single-engine plane at Clearwater Airpark, Florida, after it had closed for the night. This is according to Daniel Pursell, the chief instructor at Huffman Aviation, the Venice flight school attended by the two during the latter half of 2000. Mohamed Atta, is also staying for a time at the apartment of a 21-year-old blonde-haired pizza restaurant manager named Amanda Keller. Keller lives in the Sandpiper Apartments in Venice, Florida, the same complex in which Atta reportedly shared a (presumably) separate apartment with Marwan al-Shehhi and four others months earlier.
Investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker later locates and interviews Amanda Keller, and she claims that the Middle Eastern man who was briefly her boyfriend was indeed Mohamed Atta. However, in 2006 she will retract this and claimed she had lied to Hopsicker. Stating that, “It was my bad for lying. I really didn’t think about it until after I did it.” Between the dates of June 28-July 1, Mohamed Atta takes his first trip to Vegas, others involved in the 9/11 plot also travel there shortly. Flying from Fort Lauderdale to Boston and then, the next day, to Las Vegas via San Francisco with United Airlines.
He stays there three nights, then returns to Boston via Denver, and flies to New York the next day. The reason for these trips is not definitively known, although there will be speculation that the hijackers are casing aircraft similar to those they will hijack on 9/11. Around this time, the NSA intercepts telephone conversations between alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, but apparently it does not share the information with any of the other agencies.
By August 2nd 2001, Mohamed Atta makes several calls to plot facilitator, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, to coordinate the arrival in the U.S of four muscle hijackers. On August 4,2001, a Saudi named Mohamed al-Kahtani is stopped at the Orlando, Florida, airport and denied entry to the U.S. Jose Melendez-Perez, the customs official who stops him, later says he was suspicious of al-Khatani because he had arrived with no return ticket, no hotel reservations, spoke little English, behaved menacingly, and offered conflicting information on the purpose of his travel.
At one point, al-Kahtani said that someone was waiting for him elsewhere at the airport. After 9/11, surveillance cameras show that Mohamed Atta was at the Orlando airport that day. Was this the 20th hijacker? Or plan for more hijackings thru-ought the day? Which was seen as a possible scenario with United Airlines Flight 23 out of JFK that saw 4 Arab men arguing with stewardesses on not being able to take off due to the TSA grounding all flights.
Their luggage showed box cutters, pilots licenses from Florida and an Al Qaeda manual. They had left before their contents were discovered by airport security. In an interview with Al Jazeera journalist Yosri Fouda in 2002, would-be hijacker Ramzi bin al-Shibh will claim that, roughly around this day, he receives a coded chat room message about the 9/11 plot from future hijacker Mohamed Atta in the US. Fouda will later co-write a book, and in it he will allege that bin al-Shibh gave him a computer disc containing the exact message. The message, as translated by Fouda, reads:
“The first semester commences in three weeks. There are no changes. All is well. There are good signs and encouraging ideas. Two high schools and two universities. Everything is going according to plan. This summer will surely be hot. I want to talk to you about some details. Nineteen certificates for private education and four exams. Regards to the Professor. Goodbye.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/09/september11.afghanistan
Between August 25-September 5th 2001, all the 9/11 hijackers book their flights for September 11, 2001, using their alleged actual names. The total cost of the tickets is in excess of $30,000. On August 27th, A Saudi family abruptly moves out of a Sarasota, Florida residence linked to individuals who will later be accused of being among the 9/11 hijackers. The residence is owned by a Saudi couple, Esam Ghazzawi and his American-born wife, Deborah, and is also occupied by Esam’s daughter, Anoud, and her husband, Abdulaziz al-Hijji. On September 7th, President Bush’s plan to visit a Sarasota, Florida, elementary school on September 11 is publicly announced. September 10, 2001 one day before the 9/11 attacks Mohamed Atta calls 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) in Afghanistan. KSM gives final approval to Atta to launch the attacks. The specifics of the conversation haven’t been released. This is alleged by the 9/11 Commission report.
Later in the evening Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari arrive in Portland, Maine, where they spend the night at the Comfort Inn, they would check out at 5:33 a.m the following day and drive their rented Nissan to Portland International Jetport Airport, entering its parking lot at 5:40 a.m. They are wearing formal attire, ties and jackets. Atta checks in two bags, al-Omari none. Atta is randomly selected for additional security scrutiny by the FAA’s Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System. Noting that their flight is soon due to leave, the ticket agent who checks them in, Michael Tuohey, relates to them, “You’re cutting it close.”
Atta becomes angry when Tuohey informs him he will have to check in again in Boston. He complains that he was assured he would have a “one-step check-in.” 6:45am, The Portland-to-Boston flight arrive on time at Boston’s Logan Airport. At 7:47am Atta is said to have called Marwan al-Shehhi as both planes sit on the runway. They presumably confirm the plot is on. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, at 8:46am, American Airlines Flight 11 is suspected to be piloted by lead hijacker Mohamed Atta whom crashes the plane into the North Tower killing all 76 passengers on board.
Those who were closest to Atta while he lived in Egypt were shocked to their core as they began to hear the news over the days and weeks, as press releases from the Justice Department, led by U.S Attorney General, John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller pieced together from the information they collected regarding who were suspected to be involved. However the Justice Department the local & federal authorities, led by the FBI’s PENTTBOM investigation (although vastly extensive), were not as “forthcoming” in the years to come when it came to the two Congressional inquiries which saw the intelligence agencies committing “malfeasance”.
But to the more dedicated, researcher, there was far more information that were left either ignored or dismissed by the Congressional committee’s altogether. This included the identity of the hijackers involved. Who really were they? Were they the actual identities as Mueller and Ashcroft stated to the media on September 27th 2001?
In the months after the attacks, Al Jazeera reporter, Yosri Fouda would interview the grieving and astonished lawyer, Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, where he would continue to repeat that his son could not have done this horrific act.
“I am Egyptian. I am loyal to Egypt. I am proud of Egypt and the government of Egypt. But there is one point i will never accept. Oh Egypt! Where is my son? This is your responsibility, on top of that stands the president of Egypt. Answer this question to me, Mr. President, where is my son? All the evidence proves that he had nothing to do with that incident. So where is he?”
