September 12, 2001, St. Petersburg Times, Hijackers penetrated security with apparent ease, by Bill Adair, diigo,
September 12, 2001, AP - St. Petersburg Times, Feds investigating possible terrorist-attack links in Florida,
September 12, 2001, AP - North County Times, Feds investigating possible terrorist-attack links in Florida, by Ken Thomas, Associated Press Writer, Archived, diigo,
September 13, 2001, New York Times, Hijacking Trail Leads F.B.I. to Florida Flight School, by Dana Canedy and David E. Sanger,
September 13, 2001, The Miami Herald, They were listed aboard planes in N.Y. crashes, by Daniel de Vise, Curtis Morgan and Manny Garcia, diigo,
September 13, 2001, St. Petersburg Times, FBI seizes records of students at flight schools, by Barry Klein, Wes Allison, Kathryn Wexler and Jeff Testerman, Archived,
September 14, 2001, Chicago Tribune, U.S. tracks terrorist rings; 18 hijackers identified, Suspected accomplices held, by Naftali Bendavid, Washington Bureau. Tribune staff reporters John Crewdson, Stephen Hedges, Mike Dorning, Geoffrey Dougherty, Eric Ferkenhoff and Judy Graham contributed to this report.
September 14, 2001, Washington Post, page A18, Hijack Suspects' Profile: Polite And Purposeful; Neighbors Remember Quiet Lives, Determination in Flight School, by Amy Goldstein and Peter Finn, Washington Post Staff Writers,
September 16, 2001, Los Angeles Times - The Michigan Daily, Suspect leaves trail for FBI to follow, Archived, diigo,
September 13, 2011 [01:21 PM] Palm Beach Post, Encounters with 9/11 hijackers still haunt Palm Beach County residents, by Frank Cerabino, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer, Archived,
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September 12, 2001, St. Petersburg Times, Hijackers penetrated security with apparent ease, by Bill Adair, diigo,
WASHINGTON -- It seemed surprisingly easy.
Tuesday morning, the airliners hijacked for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon took off within 15 minutes of each other from three different cities, indicating a stunning breach of the nation's aviation security system.
Although officials have not yet provided details about what happened to the pilots of the four airliners or how the pilots might have been subdued, it appears the attackers were able to take control of the big jetliners and use them like missiles.
Members of Congress said the security system had failed.
"There were four airplanes hijacked, two from the same airport and one from the nation's capital," said Rep. C.W. Bill Young, the Largo Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee. "There is no doubt that aviation security broke down."
Said Rep. Mark Foley, R-West Palm Beach: "Clearly there was a serious shortfall in aviation security. There has definitely been a breach."
The system to detect weapons and foil hijackers has worked remarkably well since it was put in place in the 1970s. It has prevented all but a handful of minor events.
There was a 1979 hijacking of an American Airlines plane from New York to Chicago by a Serbian nationalist. The hijacker freed all 127 passengers and five of the plane's eight crew members at Chicago's O'Hare airport. And there was a 1991 case involving a man on a United Airlines flight who threatened to hijack a plane because he was upset that he couldn't smoke.
Cathal Flynn, who was in charge of security for the Federal Aviation Administration from 1993 to 2000, said the system has been very successful. He said that in modern history until Tuesday, no one had been killed from an act of aviation terrorism on a domestic flight.
"There is a lot of diligence that goes on in the screening system," said Flynn, who now works for Argenbright, an aviation security company. "Nevertheless, the FAA has recognized that the quality of screening needed to be improved."
The nation's aviation security system is based on fences and metal detectors.
The fences and other physical barriers are supposed to limit who can get near an airliner. Only airline employees and other authorized workers are allowed on the Tarmac near a plane.
The metal detectors are supposed to identify any weapons that passengers might try to carry on board a plane. Every year, 1,000 to 2,000 weapons are found by the employees at the metal detectors. Many more guns and knives are found in airport trash cans and rest rooms, where they have been discarded.
The system has its holes.
For years, inspectors have found that unauthorized people could get access to airplanes and that many weapons went undetected by security employees.
"The big question is how the terrorists got weapons aboard the plane," said Bill Sorbie, a retired US Airways pilot who lives in St. Petersburg. "Unfortunately, there are a lot of ways. You put me in an airport I've never even seen before, and I guarantee you I'll get aboard a plane with a weapon."
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Barbara Olson, a lawyer and television commentator aboard the plane that hit the Pentagon, called her husband from the air and told him that the hijackers were using knives.
Knives have been known to go undetected by screening employees.
Once hijackers took control of the planes, it would have been relatively easy to make a collision course with the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. With clear weather in New York and Washington, the pilots would not have needed navigational aids to find their way to the targets, Sorbie said.
The air traffic control system is not designed to prevent incidents like Tuesday's attacks. The mission for air traffic controllers is to keep airplanes moving through the skies while safely separated from other aircraft.
Beary Johns, an air traffic controller in the New York area, said planes frequently fly within a mile of World Trade Center, so there might have been very little warning for controllers when the plane suddenly veered toward the building.
"There's no way to stop them," Johns said.
There have been many complaints about security at the Boston airport, where two of the flights originated. The Boston Globe reported two years ago that doors were left propped open, giving unauthorized people access to the runways and airplanes. The newspaper said screeners hired by the airlines to staff checkpoints in terminals "routinely failed" to detect test items, such as pipe bombs and guns that were hidden in bags carried by the special agents.
Boston is not alone. Similar findings have been made at many other airports over the years.
Last year, the General Accounting Office said the nation's aviation security system was vulnerable to an attack. The GAO said the people hired by the airlines and airports to operate weapons screening systems were poorly paid, often earning less than workers at airport fast-food restaurants.
"It is often said that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link," Gerald Dillingham, the GAO's associate director for transportation, testified before a Senate subcommittee.
Similar findings have been made by the National Research Council and the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The FAA, responding to those complaints, has proposed new rules to regulate the screening companies. But final rules have not been issued.
"The FAA has been involved in a considerable effort to improve screening," Flynn said. "The FAA has not had its head in the sand about this."
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September 12, 2001, AP - St. Petersburg Times, Feds investigating possible terrorist-attack links in Florida,
MIAMI -- FBI agents investigating the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington told a southwest Florida man that two men who stayed with him while getting flight training last year were involved in Tuesday's attacks on the World Trade Center, the man said.
Charlie Voss, a former employee at Huffman Aviation in Venice, said FBI agents who interviewed him at his home told him that authorities found a car at Boston's Logan Airport registered to the two men.
"They informed us individuals who had crossed our path were involved yesterday with the airplane in the tragedy at the World Trade Center," Voss said.
Voss said one of men who stayed at the house in July 2000 was named Mohamed Atta. He said he knew the other man only by the name of Marwan.
Shortly after 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, the FBI in Miami issued a national bulletin for law enforcement agencies to be on the lookout for two cars. The bulletin did not mention whether the vehicles were linked to Tuesday's attacks.
Records with the Florida Division of Motor Vehicles show that one of the vehicles the FBI was pursuing -- a 1989 red Pontiac -- was registered to Atta.
In Coral Springs, the FBI was at an apartment complex that Atta listed as his last address with the motor vehicle division.
"We were out there at the FBI late last night at that location," said Coral Springs Police Sgt. Rich Nicorvo. He said the FBI was at the address for at least one hour.
Agents were conducting interviews and sought search warrants in southern Florida and in Daytona Beach in central Florida amid evidence that suspected sympathizers of the accused terrorist were operating in the area, officials said.
"We are covering leads all over the country and this is one of the many we are covering," said Brian Kensel, an FBI spokesman in Tampa.
In Venice, Voss said the two men said they had just arrived from Germany and wanted to take flight training at Huffman Aviation, where Voss worked for more than 13 years. He no longer is with the company.
The houseguests took flight training on small planes at Venice Municipal Airport, about 60 miles south of Tampa. Voss said the men were asked to leave their home after a week when the couple grew uncomfortable with them.
Voss said he wasn't involved with their training. The company offers training in light, single-engine aircraft like Cessnas and Pipers but no commercial aircraft.
Rudy Dekkers, president and owner of Huffman Aviation, said the FBI was looking at student records but he declined to provide any details.
Kensel of the FBI could not confirm whether a search was conducted in Venice.
Officials at Embry-Riddle, the world's largest university specializing in aviation, would not confirm if the FBI had contacted the school.
Spokeswoman Lisa Ledewitz said one out of every four commercial airline pilots was trained at Embry-Riddle. Students train in single-engine planes and until last December the school used a Boeing 737 simulator.
"We are suffering like the rest of the country," Ledewitz said. She said all international students who enroll in the pilot program have to receive prior approval from the U.S. State Department.
The FBI executed search warrants in Davie in Broward County north of the Miami area, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale reported, quoting Miami FBI spokesman Judy Orihuela. Orihuela did not immediately return phone messages Wednesday.
Hollywood Police Detective Carlos Negron said Wednesday that the department was helping the FBI in an investigation in Broward and declined further comment.
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September 12, 2001, AP - North County Times, Feds investigating possible terrorist-attack links in Florida, by Ken Thomas, Associated Press Writer, Archived, diigo,
MIAMI (AP) -- A Florida man says FBI agents told him that two men who stayed with him while getting flight training last year were involved in Tuesday's attacks on the World Trade Center.
Charlie Voss, a former employee at Huffman Aviation in Venice, said FBI agents who interviewed him at his home told him that authorities found a car at Boston's Logan Airport registered to the two men.
"They informed us individuals who had crossed our path were involved yesterday with the airplane in the tragedy at the World Trade Center," Voss said.
Voss said one of men who stayed at the house in July 2000 was named Mohamed Atta. He said he knew the other man only by the name of Marwan.
Shortly after 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, the FBI in Miami issued a national bulletin for law enforcement agencies to be on the lookout for two cars. The bulletin did not mention whether the vehicles were linked to Tuesday's attacks.
Records with the Florida Division of Motor Vehicles show that one of the vehicles the FBI was pursuing -- a 1989 red Pontiac -- was registered to Atta. Atta, 33, previously had a drivers license in Egypt, state records show.
In Coral Springs, witnesses said about 50 FBI agents and police officers Tuesday night blanketed the apartment complex that Atta had listed with the motor vehicle division as his last address. Officers interviewed neighbors and showed a black-and-white mug-style photograph with the name Mohamed at the bottom.
About 90 miles away in Vero Beach, two sheriffs cars and several unmarked cars surrounded a house and the street leading to the house was cordoned with yellow police tape.
Michael Terrell, who lives next door and rents from the same landlord, said the landlord told him the family who lived there had moved to Vero Beach to attend the Flight Safety Academy. The family had lived there for six to eight months, he said.
FBI agents knocked on his door around 7:30 a.m. and asked if he had ever talked with the neighbors, Terrell said.
In Hollywood, Shuckums restaurant manager Tony Amos said FBI agents showed photos of two men to restaurant employees Tuesday night. The photos had signatures on the bottom, Amos said. He said he identified the photo of a man whose first name was signed Mohamed.
Amos said the two men had each consumed several drinks Friday night and had given the bartender a hard time. Mohamed told Amos he was a pilot.
"The guy Mohamed was drunk, his voice was slurred and he had a thick accent," Amos said.
Bartender Patricia Idrissi said the men argued over the bill, and when she asked if there was a problem, "Mohamed said he worked for American Airlines and he could pay his bill."
Agents were conducting interviews and sought search warrants in southern Florida and in Daytona Beach in central Florida amid evidence that suspected terrorist sympathizers were operating in the area, officials said.
"We are covering leads all over the country and this is one of the many we are covering," said Brian Kensel, an FBI spokesman in Tampa.
In Venice, Voss said the two men said they had just arrived from Germany and wanted to take flight training at Huffman Aviation, where Voss worked for more than 13 years. He no longer is with the company.
The houseguests took flight training on small planes at Venice Municipal Airport, about 60 miles south of Tampa. Voss said the men were asked to leave their home after a week when the couple grew uncomfortable with them.
Voss said he wasn't involved with their training. The company offers training in light, single-engine aircraft like Cessnas and Pipers but no commercial aircraft.
Rudy Dekkers, president and owner of Huffman Aviation, said the FBI was looking at student records at the flight school, including copies of passports from the men.
Kensel of the FBI could not confirm whether a search was conducted in Venice.
Officials at Embry-Riddle, the world's largest university specializing in aviation, would not confirm if the FBI had contacted the school.
Spokeswoman Lisa Ledewitz said one out of every four commercial airline pilots was trained at Embry-Riddle. Students train in single-engine planes and until last December the school used a Boeing 737 simulator.
"We are suffering like the rest of the country," Ledewitz said. She said all international students who enroll in the pilot program have to receive prior approval from the U.S. State Department.
The FBI executed search warrants in Davie in Broward County north of the Miami area, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale reported, quoting Miami FBI spokesman Judy Orihuela. Orihuela declined comment Wednesday.
Hollywood Police Detective Carlos Negron said Wednesday that the department was helping the FBI in an investigation in Broward and declined further comment.
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September 13, 2001, New York Times, Hijacking Trail Leads F.B.I. to Florida Flight School, by Dana Canedy and David E. Sanger,
HOLLYWOOD, Fla., Sept. 12 — Patricia Idrissi would not have noticed the customer at that table she was waiting on at the Shuckums restaurant here on Friday, except that he drank Stolichnaya vodka for three hours and then seemed not to want to pay his $48 bar tab.
The man's response when Ms. Idrissi called her manager to help settle the dispute seemed unremarkable at the time. But that changed late Tuesday when federal agents arrived at the seafood restaurant and bar and flashed pictures of the man and one other who they said were suspected of being involved in the terror attacks on the United States that morning.
"Of course I can pay," the restaurant workers recall the man saying. "I'm a pilot."
As the federal investigation into the attacks began to unfold today, agents zeroed in on Central and South Florida, where some of the pilots believed to have hijacked the planes that carried out the attacks were thought to have ties.
F.B.I. agents descended on flight schools, neighborhoods and restaurants in pursuit of leads.
The authorities would not confirm where they were conducting the investigation or about whom they were seeking information. But several people in South and Central Florida contacted by the F.B.I. said agents gave them the names of two men whom they identified as suspects: Mohammed Atta, the man who was drinking vodka, and Marwan al- Shehhi, who was drinking rum.
Some people contacted by the F.B.I. said agents had told them the men were on the flights that departed from Boston.
"They just said these guys were on the manifest on a flight out of Boston, and I knew what it meant," said Anthony Amos, the Shuckums manager. "They said the guys were dead."
If the two men were indeed on the plane or involved in the hijacking, something the F.B.I. has not declared, then their education in how to fly aircraft took place in a low-slung building off a small airstrip in Venice, Fla., about 80 miles south of Tampa, at Huffman Aviation, where a green sign next to the front door reads "Learn to Fly Here!"
The F.B.I. arrived at Huffman at 2:30 this morning and walked out with all the school's records, including photocopies of the men's passports. Rudi Dekkers, owner of the school, remembers the two men — one slight, the other large — as "walk-ins" who arrived in July of last year and stayed until they passed an F.A.A. test in November.
"They paid by check, about $10,000 each," said Mr. Dekkers, 45, a Dutch native who today suddenly found himself dealing with clamoring reporters and satellite trucks parked in front of his small school.
The two men were clearly from the Middle East, he said, and they complained that they had begun instruction elsewhere but didn't like the school. "They spoke quite good English," he said, but unlike the many other foreign students who come to Huffman for instruction, they did not socialize.
"They were by themselves, not hanging out with other students," he said. "Most of our students from other countries go to bars and take their time. They were strange birds."
A current student at Huffman Aviation, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, said he knew both men. He said Mr. Atta was from Egypt and Mr. al-Shehhi was from the United Arab Emirates.
Mr. Dekkers said the two men quickly picked up on the elements of flying — one already had some instruction, he said — and by November they were ready for their test. That enabled them to fly small twin- engine planes, but they were trained chiefly on the kind of prop planes that Mr. Dekkers uses for instruction at the school.
"I've been flying for 20 years," Mr. Dekkers said. "But if I ever sat up in the cockpit of a commercial jetliner — well, it is completely different."
With 15 or 20 hours of instruction in jet aircraft, he thought, they could become proficient enough to fly them, and he heard, but did not know for sure, that the men were headed to a school elsewhere in Florida for training on larger planes.
Investigators apparently focused some attention on a much more advanced aviation school in Daytona Beach, the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. School officials would not confirm any F.B.I. involvement, but students said investigators were there within hours of Tuesday's attacks.
Police officials nearby said that agents searched an apartment building where a person named Mohammed Atta lived several years ago.
Mr. Dekkers said he had debriefed the instructor who worked with the two men but declined to give the instructor's name.
"He's horrified," Mr. Dekkers said. "He had no hint, nothing," of what the men might plan to do with their flying skills.
Also today, F.B.I. agents visited the home of Charles and Dru Voss, who rented the flight students a room in their house while the men attended the flight school. Their guests, the Vosses told the authorities, were rude and secretive, so they asked them to leave after a week.
"They mainly kept to themselves, and we had very little conversation, if any," Ms. Voss said. "It was `good morning, have a nice day.' They were very arrogant and made very smart remarks."
In addition to their attention on Hollywood and Venice, the F.B.I. also searched an apartment in Coral Springs, where Mr. Atta is believed to have lived recently. Neighbors said as many as 50 agents descended on the three-story apartment complex, Tara Gardens, where two-bedroom furnished apartments rent for $1,200 a month.
The F.B.I. would not comment on the specific sites, though officials said thatt several in Florida were being searched and that numerous people were being questioned.
In Vero Beach, about 70 miles north of West Palm Beach, F.B.I. agents searched four homes in three neighborhoods, according to The Associated Press. In one neighborhood, agents searched two houses for 12 hours, leaving with several garbage bags of evidence. Officials towed away two cars from the houses, which were next to each other. A neighbor, Everett Tripp, said a Middle Eastern family with four children moved out of one of the houses last weekend.
The landlord of the other house, Paul Stimelind, identified the tenant as Adnan Bukhari, who told Mr. Stimelind that he worked for Saudi Airlines and was training at Flight Safety Academy in Vero Beach. Mr. Bukhari arrived with family in June 2000 and planned to move out in mid- August, Mr. Stimelind told The A.P.
In addition, agents asked Hank Habora about a neighbor, Amer Kamfar, 41. Mr. Kamfar was licensed as a flight engineer to fly turbojets and listed a Saudi Airlines post office box as his address in F.A.A. records.
Mr. Habora said the family moved into the house in February and recently left abruptly, The A.P. reported. "They threw out everything they had: clothes, dishes," he said.
Here in Hollywood, about 30 miles north of Miami, agents arrived late Tuesday evening and began interviewing employees at several bars and shops, including the Shuckums Oyster Pub and Seafood Grill.
"They came in about 10:45 last night and asked if we could identify the two gentlemen who were on the pictures," Mr. Amos, the Shuckums manager, said, referring to the F.B.I. agents who questioned his staff. "My bartender and my server could identify both of them."
The Shuckums workers said they specifically recalled Mr. Atta, who was joined by the other suspect and a third man. "He was sitting with the third gentleman," Mr. Amos said. "The F.B.I. did not show me a photo of this third guy. They were talking back and forth all night, and the Mohammed guy was really upset at what the other guy was saying."
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September 13, 2001, The Miami Herald, They were listed aboard planes in N.Y. crashes, by Daniel de Vise, Curtis Morgan and Manny Garcia, diigo,
Published Thursday,
Federal authorities are investigating whether as many as five Florida men who died in Tuesday's terrorist plane crashes were involved in the hijackings and trained for the deadly assaults in local flight schools.
SUSPECT: Mohammed Atta, of Coral Springs, was killed in the World Trade Center crash.
Agents swarmed Florida on Wednesday to chase leads in an adrenaline-charged search for traces of men who may have steered the hijacked jetliners.
The trail led to a bar in Hollywood, where agents believe a party of suspected terrorists spent time drinking and flashing wads of cash. And to a condo development in Coral Springs. And to flight schools in Venice, Lantana, Vero Beach and Daytona Beach and homes in several Florida cities.
A portrait emerged of the suspects -- five men who died on the doomed planes and a handful of still-living men who may have played a role in the plot. They were men who had partied together. Some held pilot licenses and trained at Florida flight schools. Two had ties to a post office box belonging to Saudi Arabian Airlines.
Public records trails were as thin as their connections, and even their nationalities remained unclear. One man previously had a driver's license from Egypt, another an international one issued in the United Arab Emirates.
The dead suspects:
* Mohamed Atta, 33, of Coral Springs, listed on the passenger manifest of an airplane hijacked Tuesday from Boston's Logan International Airport. Atta was killed in the World Trade Center crash.
* Marwan Alshehhi of Hollywood. Authorities found a car at the Boston airport registered to Atta and Alshehhi, and the two men took flight lessons together, witnesses said.
* Waleed Al Shehri, 25, a Daytona Beach man who once held a commercial pilot license.
* Abdulatif A Al-Omari, 31. His Miami apartment was raided late Tuesday.
* Wail M. Al Shehri, 28, of Boynton Beach.Alive and under FBI scrutiny:
* Adnan Bukhari, a Vero Beach man who told a witness he worked for Saudi Arabian Airlines. He wasn't on the hijacked planes and reportedly was taken into federal custody after the attack.
* Amer Mohammed Kamfar, whose Vero Beach address was searched. He, like Bukhari, is linked to a Saudi Airlines post office box. He remains at large and possibly armed with an AK-47, police sources say.
Federal authorities said the names of four dead men were on the passenger manifests of American Airlines Flight 11, the first jetliner to crash into the World Trade Center.
The fifth dead suspect, Alshehhi, died aboard United Airlines Flight 175, the second plane to strike the New York skyscrapers. He was a Hollywood resident who apparently rented a car with Atta later found in Boston. He is licensed as a commercial pilot.
FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela in Miami declined to comment on the investigation.
FBI raids began late Tuesday and continued Wednesday in several Florida cities.
Much of the attention centered on Atta, who authorities believe may have piloted one of the doomed jets.
Atta arrived in Broward County in early 2000. He moved to Venice on Florida's Gulf Coast in July to study at a flight school. He then moved back to a Coral Springs condominium complex.
Witnesses placed him in Broward as recently as last week, when Atta and some Arab friends had a raucous night of drinking at a Shuckum's restaurant in Hollywood.
Atta and Alshehhi trained from July to November at Huffman Aviation, a school that operates out of the Venice airport. Authorities were tracing dozens of leads that place the men in Broward and Venice over the last year.
In Venice, a couple told FBI agents Wednesday morning they had leased a bedroom to Atta and Alshehhi for about a week last summer.
Drucilla Voss, interviewed by The Herald, said the agents "did say it's nothing positive, but they [were] checking out the chance that they were the pilots."
Voss said she hardly knew Atta or the other man but found them so unpleasant that she had asked her husband to kick them out.
"They're the only ones we've ever had to ask to leave," she said. While the men were polite to her husband, she said they were arrogant to her and often made sarcastic comments when her husband was away.
Rudi Dekkers, president and owner of Huffman Aviation, which runs Venice Flying Services at the Venice airport, said he gave agents the two men's passports, one man's driver's license and their applications, which included emergency contacts and the like.
"The feds were happy with the file," Dekkers said.
The two men spent some time on a small Cessna and a Piper Seneca, he said.
After leaving the Venice school around November, Atta resurfaced at the Coral Springs apartment, records show.
Agents converged on Atta's apartment in the Tara Gardens Condominiums complex at 10001 W. Atlantic Blvd. in Coral Springs on Tuesday night. They searched Apartment 122 for several hours, according to Coral Springs officers who participated.
Officers interviewed neighbors and showed a black-and-white photograph with the name Mohamed at the bottom.
"They took something from under the rugs, but I don't know what," said Christopher Rodriguez, 15.
Also Tuesday night, two FBI agents visited Shuckum's, a neighborhood bar at 1814 Harrison St. in Hollywood. They showed bartender Patricia Idrissi, 38, photographs of two Middle Eastern men. She immediately recognized one as a customer who had given her a hard time Friday.
He had come in with two other men around 3 p.m.
One wandered off to play a video machine at the end of the bar. The man in the picture, whom she believes the agents referred to as Mohamed, sat at the bar talking in a foreign language with his associate. Mohamed drank about five Stolichnaya vodkas and orange juice. His companion had five Captain Morgans and Cokes.
After about 90 minutes they said they were ready to leave but argued about that the $48 bill. She called her manager, Tony Amos, 37.
"I said to they guy, hey, if you can't pay your bill, let me know upfront and we'll work something out," Amos said. "He got angry and said 'You think I can't pay? I'm a pilot for American Airlines. I can pay my [expletive] bill.'"
Idrissi said the man then pulled out a wad of $100 and $50 bills, paid the tab and left her a $3 tip.
The bar employees said FBI agents told them at least one of the men was from Pakistan and that passenger manifests showed they were on one of the hijacked planes that took off from Boston.
Agents followed Atta's trail to Lantana, where he and other suspected hijackers apparently brushed up flying skills at Palm Beach County Park Airport.
"He seemed normal to me," said Marian Smith, owner of Palm Beach Beach Flight Training. "I remember he said he wanted to get in 100 hours."
Smith, who was interviewed by FBI agents Wednesday morning, said her dealings with Atta took place in the past "few weeks, within a month. I gave all the records to the FBI . . . The first time he came in I sent him out with a flight instructor just to make sure he was OK. [The instructor] is pretty shaken up. He didn't come in to work today."
The FBI also interviewed another Lantana charter company owner, Chuck Clapper of Lantana Air, who remembered Atta's face when agents showed him a photograph -- but little else.
Clapper said the FBI is looking at another pilot trained at Flight Safety in Vero Beach. Clapper called Flight Safety "the largest aviation training company in the world." He said the company "has a contract with Saudi Arabia, Arabian Airlines. I think they train the corporate pilots."
In Daytona Beach, investigators were probing whether some of the hijackers might have trained at a flight school there. Government records place Atta at an address near Daytona Beach in recent years.
Lisa Ledewitz, a spokeswoman for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said the school was cooperating law enforcement officials who had subpoenaed records.
Not all investigative paths led to Atta.
In Vero Beach, FBI agents and sheriff's deputies raided three houses in two neighborhoods, with armed agents serving search warrants on students or former students of the training school Flight Safety International.
They hauled off boxes and bags full of items. At a $1,400-a-month rental home occupied until Monday by Adnan Bukhari, agents took a paper shredder, flight books, bank slips and a telephone list of Saudi Arabian airline students in Vero Beach, according to an inventory left at the site.
Bukhari, a licensed pilot who had just completed a course in flight engineering, was reportedly taken into federal custody.
Landlord Paul Stimeling said Bukhari moved his wife and five children out of the home near Vero Beach Municipal Airport two weeks ago. Stimeling said he last saw Bukhari Monday morning.
Stimeling said Bukhari told him he worked for Saudi Arabian Airlines.
According to FAA records, a man aboard American Airlines Flight 11 -- Waleed Ahmed Al Shehri -- had a pilot's license with a post office box address of Saudi Arabian Airlines in Jeddah.
Amer Mohammed Kamfar, whose Vero Beach address was searched, also used the same Saudi Airlines post office box. He is rated as small plane pilot and engineer for turbojets.
Late Wednesday afternoon, authorities put out an alert for a silver 1996 Plymouth Voyager van with Florida tags D97 RFU registered to Kamfar, 41. Agents also raided his neighbor's house.
Phones were not being answered Wednesday night at the U.S. offices of Saudi Arabian Airlines.
Herald staff writers Lisa Arthur, Jennifer Babson, Erika Bolstad, Lesley Clarke, Wanda J. DeMarzo, Andrea Elliott, David Kidwell, Larry Lebowitz, Phil Long and Charles Rabin contributed to this report.
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September 13, 2001, St. Petersburg Times, FBI seizes records of students at flight schools, by Barry Klein, Wes Allison, Kathryn Wexler and Jeff Testerman, Archived,
Federal agents worked furiously Wednesday to determine if the hijackers responsible for the worst attack in U.S. history learned how to fly in Florida.
At an aviation school in Venice, FBI agents seized files on two former students, one from Egypt and the other from the United Arab Emirates. The FBI says both men are suspects in the assault that leveled the World Trade Center and sent shock waves around the world.
Mohamed Atta, 33, may have guided American Airlines Flight 11 into the first of the two towers that later collapsed, killing what officials assume will be thousands of office workers and hundreds of their would-be rescuers, the Boston Globe reported. He has been linked to at least six other suspected hijackers who boarded the two doomed flights at Boston's Logan Airport.
Atta got on the jet off a connecting flight from Portland, Maine. Two bags with Atta's name tags were on the Portland flight, but did not get transferred in time to be loaded on the Los Angeles-bound flight that left Logan Airport at 7:59 a.m., about 45 minutes before it smashed into the World Trade Center tower in New York.
The passenger list for United Airlines Flight 175 shows that a man named Marwan Alshehhi got on that plane that left Boston and slammed into one of the Manhattan skyscrapers, the Globe reported.
Last year, both men paid $10,000 each for two months of flight instruction at Huffman Aviation in Sarasota County, Rudi Dekkers, the school's owner, said Wednesday. He said FBI agents who came to his school took their student files.
A former employee at the flight school, Charlie Voss, said FBI agents told him the two were involved in Tuesday's attack on the World Trade Center. The men had stayed briefly with Voss while attending flight school in July 2000.
Both men always seemed to have plenty of cash, said Azzan Ali, who befriended them last year when all were students at the aviation school.
They had cell phones, American clothes and a red Pontiac they tooled around in during the two months they spent in Venice. They liked to discuss politics, Ali said, often railing angrily about Israel.
After finishing flight instruction last year, they apparently moved to South Florida. Atta listed an apartment in Coral Springs -- northwest of Fort Lauderdale -- as his address when he obtained a Florida driver's license in May.
A bar manager in Hollywood told FBI agents he saw the two men drinking heavily last week.
Tony Amos, the night manager at Shuckums Bar in Hollywood, told the Palm Beach Post that Atta argued with him over his tab. When Amos asked Atta whether he could pay, Atta got offended and said, "I'm a pilot for American Airlines and I can pay my bill," bartender Patricia Idrissi said.
"They were wasted," said Idrissi, who said she directed the two men to a Chinese restaurant a few doors down.
They later returned and each ordered about five drinks, she said. The bill came to $48 and the men began arguing in broken English. After the confrontation with Amos, she said, Atta paid her with a $100 bill from a thick wad of currency in large denominations.
They left her a $3 tip.
But the more than 400 federal agents chasing leads Wednesday in Florida had other targets besides the Venice flight school.
Authorities pored over student records at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, which has trained hundreds of pilots from Arab countries. They also interviewed people in Coral Springs, Dania and Hollywood, and searched homes in two Vero Beach neighborhoods, detaining at least one resident.
"They had more satellite dishes on a home than any I've ever seen," said Rick Poley, who was questioned by the FBI about two student pilots -- both Middle-Eastern -- who lived across the street in south Vero Beach. "They had at least three dishes on one side of the house."
In a neighborhood across town, an estimated 50 FBI agents invaded a residential neighborhood at 5 a.m. and evacuated many of the residents.
They were worried about a bomb in two of the homes. One had been rented for months by Adnar Z. Bukhari, said Bukhari's landlord, Paul Stimeling. He said the other was rented by a man named Alomeri.
The landlord said the men, both described as pilots for Saudi Arabia Airlines who attended the FlightSafety International flight school in Vero Beach, packed their families off to new homes at the beginning of the month. The two men then moved in together.
Neighbors said Alomeri hasn't been seen for a week.
On Wednesday, the FBI seized a number of articles from Bukhari's home and took him into custody.
According to a government receipt left in the home, agents seized unidentified black bags, vacuum cleaner bags, compact discs, manila folders, notes, books of "an unknown language" and a man's white robe.
Left behind were stacks of family photos, dishes, pots and pans, and stacks of clothing. Also left in the home was a document showing Bukhari, 40, received a $2,408-a-month stipend from Saudi Arabia Airlines while attending FlightSafety.
Wayne Meliti, who lives across the street, said the two families had a total of nine children. He said they "blended in very well" in a neighborhood of small children, neat lawns and decorated mail boxes.
"Their kids went to school and were very nice," he said. "They always waved and said, "Hi."'
In early September, the children said farewell to neighborhood playmate Chelsea Harp, 12. They gave her letters and drawings and urged her to write to them at their new address.
It was in Saudi Arabia. Among the items sized by the FBI was that Saudi Arabian address.
At a second Vero Beach neighborhood, residents said FBI agents asked about Amer Kamfar, 41, who is listed as a pilot and a flight engineer to fly turbojets. A Miami television station, WPLJ, reported Wednesday night that the FBI was looking for Kamfar.
Also coming under scrutiny Wednesday was Embry-Riddle, an independent school that claims to be the oldest, largest and most prestigious school specializing in aviation and aerospace.
Embry-Riddle has a fleet of 150 instructional aircraft and an advanced flight-simulation center. It also has a sizable number of international students, many of them from Arab countries.
Six percent of last year's enrollment, or almost 400 students, moved to Daytona Beach from Saudi Arabia.
That's what attracted investigators to the campus. They wanted to look at student records to see if they could make any connections to the hijackers or other known terrorists.
They also wanted to check a tip about an illegally parked car that sported a large sticker of a man who resembled Osama bin Laden, the fugitive terrorist many think was responsible for Tuesday's attack. The agents seized the car, then released it.
Authorities were hoping for better luck with the student files, and the university was happy to oblige.
"We are quickly responding to each and every request," said Embry-Riddle spokeswoman Lisa Ledewitz.
She declined to discuss those requests, referring questions to the government. FBI officials did not return calls seeking comment.
Some of the foreign students at Embry-Riddle have been screened by the U.S. government. Ledewitz said the names and applications of every international student who applies for a spot in the school's aeronautical sciences program is sent to the State Department for approval.
She said she doesn't know what government officials are looking for, or why the process is limited only to students in that one program, which is among the school's most popular.
Ledewitz said Embry-Riddle has received several complaints about the number of foreign students on its campus since Tuesday's attacks.
But because the university trains so many commercial pilots, it is likely that at least one of the innocent pilots killed Tuesday was an alumnus, she said.
"Our people are shaken," Ledewitz said.
- Times staff writer David Adams and researchers John Martin, Cathy Wos and Caryn Baird contributed to this report, which also includes material from the Palm Beach Post.
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September 14, 2001, Chicago Tribune, U.S. tracks terrorist rings; 18 hijackers identified, Suspected accomplices held, by Naftali Bendavid, Washington Bureau. Tribune staff reporters John Crewdson, Stephen Hedges, Mike Dorning, Geoffrey Dougherty, Eric Ferkenhoff and Judy Graham contributed to this report. The staffs of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel, Tribune newspapers, also contributed.
WASHINGTON — New York police arrested one man with a fake U.S. pilot's license and detained at least five others Thursday evening as federal officials, fearing another wave of terrorist attacks against Americans, intensified an international manhunt designed to track down a ring of suspects responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history.
Justice Department officials said they have identified all 18 hijackers of the four planes used in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Meanwhile, police and federal agents portrayed those who planned the attacks as members of a wide-ranging global conspiracy involving more than one terrorist group.
New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik revealed the arrest and detentions at John F. Kennedy and at La Guardia Airports. Kerik said the suspects may have had fictitious IDs and possessed knives and had open airline tickets for the morning of Sept. 11 departing Kennedy and La Guardia Airports. "One was arrested with identification indicating he was a pilot." Kerik said. "He tried to clear security. He was stopped. The identification he had was false. He has been arrested."
After the arrest, the New York region's three major airports--Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark, N.J.--opened briefly and then abruptly closed late Thursday afternoon.
The arrests, and the suggestion that there remain active cells of terrorists at large, came as investigators broadened their investigation, sweeping into Germany and Canada.
U. S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said the two planes that hit the World Trade Center were overtaken by five hijackers each while those that slammed into the Pentagon and crashed outside Pittsburgh were seized by four individuals each.
The portrait of the suspects that emerged Thursday showed they had integrated themselves into the normal byways of American life to a remarkable degree without having to retreat underground. They lived in attractive U.S. suburbs, trained in American flight schools and drank at local bars.
U.S. officials also said for the first time that several groups may have been involved in the attacks, contrasting with earlier statements that focused more directly on Osama bin Laden as the principal mastermind and suggesting a broader, more complex conspiracy years in the making.
"They are increasingly confident that bin Laden is involved," Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), chairman of the House International Relations Committee, said after a briefing by intelligence officials. "But the CIA pointed out they are increasingly convinced that there are other terrorist networks involved, that there is a vast linkage of networks."
A senior Bush administration official confirmed "there might have been not just one, but multiple organizations."
Ashcroft said the number of known associates of the terrorists in the United States was "significant" and increasing as the investigation continued. A Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there were "probably more than 30 associates" operating in groups within several cities. Some may have already fled the country.
The Justice Department announced it would release the names of all 18 hijackers Thursday evening, along with their photos. But officials delayed the announcement, then dropped it entirely without explanation.
The names of seven of the hijackers emerged Thursday, nonetheless, providing a glimpse into the lives of the men who took over the planes, slashed and killed many of the flight attendants and set the airliners on suicide flight paths into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Several were Saudi Arabian nationals or worked for Saudia, the Saudi Arabian national airline. Two of the hijackers were cousins, and at least four lived in Florida for a time and received pilot training there.
Mohamed Atta, Waleed Alshehri, Wail Alshehri, Abdulrahman or Abdulaziz Alomari, and Satam Al Suqami were the five hijackers who took over American Airlines flight 11, en route from Boston to Los Angeles, and slammed it into the World Trade Center, setting off the day's nightmare, according to a source familiar with the FBI's list of the hijackers.
Marwan Alshehri, 23, was aboard United Airlines Flight 175, the second craft to hit the World Trade Center, according to German officials.
Hanish Hanjour, 26, who lived in Oakland, Calif., was one of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77, which took off from Dulles International Airport outside Washington and smashed into the Pentagon.
A Chinese news service reported in 1987 that a Palestinian named Mohamed Atta had been arrested in New York because he was wanted by Israeli authorities for murdering a bus driver in Israel. It was not clear whether it was the same individual.
Atta and Alshehri received pilot training in several Florida flight academies, including Huffman Aviation International in Venice, and FBI agents have descended on the school. Azzan Ali, 20, a native of Oman who is a student at the flight school, said he was interviewed by three agents Wednesday.
The two were roommates and owned a maroon Pontiac Grand Prix, Ali said, apparently the same car found by authorities at Boston's Logan Airport after the terrorist attacks.
"They never mentioned anything against Americans," Ali said. "They didn't talk bad about the United States."
Ali said the two once flew him to Boca Raton on a flying exercise.
Atta and Alshehri also took two sessions at a flight simulation center called SimCenter, at Opa-locka Airport near Miami, last December, according to Brian George, who helps his father run the facility.
The sessions, simulating flight in a Boeing 727, were part of an introductory course in jet training, which allows a person who has a commercial license to "transition" into jet aircraft.
"It kind of gives you a feel of what it's like to get behind the wheel of a big one," George said.
The 727 is a three-engine jet with an old analogue cockpit, while the 767s that rammed the World Trade Center have modern glass cockpits with video screens, digital airspeed readouts and other sophisticated equipment.
SimCenter owner Henry George told the FBI on Wednesday that Atta and Alshehri said they were from Egypt.
"They said they needed the simulator training because airlines in their country required exposure to jet aircraft," George added.
Last August, Atta moved on to Palm Beach Flight Training at an airport in Lantana, Fla. He rented a four-seat Piper Archer for Aug. 16 and 19, said Marian Smith, owner of the school.
A different companion accompanied Atta each time he flew, Smith said, adding that none of these men was identified with Tuesday's attacks.
"He told me he wanted to build up his 100 hours," Smith said. "I didn't know if he wanted to get a job with an airline or what." In the end, Atta flew three days and accumulated five hours at Lantana.
Smith said Atta spoke English well and paid in cash. She called the FBI on Wednesday morning after hearing that one of the suspects had lived in Hollywood, Fla., and recalling that Atta had given an address in that city.
The FBI's pursuit of Atta and Alshehri took them to Hamburg, Germany, where the two lived for an unspecified time. On Wednesday, German authorities forcefully entered an apartment the two had occupied, a German official said.
The two were studying electrical engineering in Harburg, a suburb of Hamburg. "They had visas for being in Germany and everything was legal," the official said.
Authorities also took an airport employee into custody and were searching for another individual in connection with Tuesday's attacks.
Three of the hijackers belonged to a terror group formed "with the aim of carrying out serious crimes together with other Islamic fundamentalist groups abroad, to attack the United States in a spectacular way through the destruction of symbolic buildings," Kay Nehm, Germany's top prosecutor, told reporters.
Details also emerged about Alshehri, who like Atta was aboard American Airlines Flight 11. For a few months in 1999, Alshehri lived in a makeshift boarding house on a quiet street in Vienna, Va. Hamid Keshavarznia, who owns the house, said he's "99 percent sure" the short-term tenant he remembers is Alshehri.
Keshavarznia said he knew very little about the young-looking, quiet man who rented one of the house's six rooms. Alshehri stayed less than six months, Keshavarznia said.
"I don't think he had a job," Keshavarznia said. "He said he was studying, but he never told me what."
Alshehri explained his departure by saying he was headed home to Saudi Arabia to visit his father, then to England to pursue a master's degree, his landlord said.
Why Alshehri was living in a boarding house in a blue-collar neighborhood in the leafy northern Virginia suburb--which is about 12 miles from Washington--is unclear.
Keshavarznia said he believed Alshehri was living on checks from his father, whom Alshehri had described as a businessman and diplomat. "He looked too innocent to be suspicious," Keshavarznia said. "Nice guy, clean cut."
It is not clear where Alshehri went after he left the Virginia boarding house. But before then, Alshehri lived in Daytona Beach, Fla., and received pilot training in Florida, like many of the other possible hijackers. The FBI has been looking at records in the Daytona Beach apartment.
FBI agents also have been scouring Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, a prominent flight school with a Daytona Beach campus. Two sources at Embry-Riddle confirmed that Alshehri graduated in 1997 and that the FBI has been looking into his past.
Agents arrived at the school shortly after the hijackings, one of the sources said, and began matching names from passenger lists with the school's enrollment records. Several of the names matched, he added, and agents are trying to confirm that the passengers and the students are the same people.
The investigation came as students received another, perhaps more disturbing piece of news. Another Embry-Riddle gradate, David Charlesbois, was the first officer on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on Tuesday.
The investigation, with more than 7,000 FBI personnel and investigators from other agencies, began spreading around the world, Ashcroft said.
In France, anti-terrorism prosecutors tried to find links between the suspects here and militant Islamic networks in their country, while police in Rome reopened the case of a theft of uniforms and badges belonging to two American Airlines pilots in April.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Halifax, Nova Scotia, were helping the FBI follow leads that suggested that some of the hijackers entered the U.S. through Canada, according to Sgt. Wayne Noonan. Investigators were focusing on the ferry service between Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and Portland, Maine. In addition, police in Halifax confiscated a rented blue Chevrolet Malibu that was found at that city's international airport.
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September 14, 2001, Washington Post, page A18, Hijack Suspects' Profile: Polite And Purposeful; Neighbors Remember Quiet Lives, Determination in Flight School, by Amy Goldstein and Peter Finn, Washington Post Staff Writers,
Two of the suspected hijackers in Tuesday's suicide attacks on New York and Washington had lived in Hamburg, where they organized a terrorist cell before moving to Florida for flight training and final practice in the cockpit.
Another suspect, who sometimes roomed with them, is believed to be the son of a Saudi diplomat with a former home in Vienna, Va., according to people who knew them in the Washington area and Florida.
Some of the suspects and their associates in Florida sent their families back to the Middle East shortly before this week's attacks. Then they hurriedly purchased expensive furniture to ship home -- or,
alternatively, threw out all their belongings.
Certain shadowy ties, certain patterns of geography and behavior, are beginning to emerge now that federal investigators have identified at least 18 men who are suspected to have died as hijackers on four airplanes Tuesday. The investigators have not publicly named any of them. Nor have they said how many suspected accomplices have been arrested and how many remain at large.
But law enforcement authorities on two continents, as well as landlords, neighbors and business people who knew the suspects, depict a group of polite and purposeful men.
Several who are remembered in Germany as Islamic fundamentalists who wore traditional Arab garb switched in the United States to typical western attire and were noticed drinking alcohol in bars.
Neighbors found them polite, if often withdrawn.
On three days in mid-August, Mohammed Atta rented a four-seat, single-engine plane from a private company at the airport in Palm Beach, Fla. Investigators believe that he was the hijacker who took over the controls of American Airlines Flight 11 -- the first to crash -- and smashed it into the World Trade Center's north tower. He told the owner of the company, Palm Beach Flight Training, that his goal was to log 100 hours in the air as soon as he could.
Atta was one of several suspects who had a pilot's license, or told people they were affiliated with airlines. Sources at the Immigration and Naturalization Service said yesterday that at least two of the
hijackers may have entered the country on M-1 visas to attend flight schools.
At least one who is believed to have died on the American flight from Boston, Abdulrahman Omari, and one who remains alive, Amer Mohammed Kamfar, had been roommates for several months in Vero Beach, Fla. They listed as their previous employer Saudi Flight Ops, a firm that performs maintenance for Saudi Arabian Airlines at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Kamfar's involvement in the attack became murkier last night, as a Saudi newspaper reported that Saudi Arabian Airlines officials had said an employee with that name was at home in Mecca and suggested that someone else may have taken his identity or his passport.
But as the role of some suspects became more ambiguous, the involvement of others came into clearer view.
In Hamburg, police conducted a raid on the second-floor apartment on a residential street that had been the home of Atta, 33, and Marwan Shehhi, 23, who reportedly died on the United Airlines flight from Boston that plowed into the trade center's south tower. Police there also arrested a Hamburg airport worker, originally from Morocco, and searched for associates, some of whom may already have left Germany, according to Hamburg's Interior Minister, Olaf Scholz.
The chief federal prosecutor there, Kay Nehm, said that Atta and Shehhi had organized a terrorist cell in the northern city, which has been the site of arrests over the years of Islamic extremists believed to be associated with Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect behind this week's attacks.
Atta and Shehhi had been enrolled at times in the local Technical University. Neighbors said they regularly hosted groups of up to 20 Arabic men late into the night.
"These people were of Arabic background and lived in Hamburg and were Islamic fundamentalists," Nehm said. "And they formed a terrorist organization with the aim of launching spectacular attacks on the institutions of the United States."
According to German news accounts, the residents of the apartment at times also included Waleed Shehri, 25, who was trained to fly large aircraft such as the American Airlines flight from Boston on which he died. Property records show that Shehri most recently lived at the same address in Daytona Beach as Ahmed Shehri, a former second secretary of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington. Both men formerly lived in Vienna, Va. simultaneously.
Yesterday, Hamid "Avis" Keshavarznia, who had been the suspected hijacker's landlord in Vienna, recalled that elder Shehri worked for the Saudi Embassy.
A Saudi Arabian official who asked not to be identified said that the embassy did not know if Waleed Shehri was the son of the former embassy official. Echoing the caution of the Saudi airline, he said Saudi officials are concerned that the terrorists may have used forged documents and stolen the identities of innocent people.
Two other pilots from Saudi Arabia, Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Bukhari, also have been mentioned widely in media reports in connection with the terrorist strikes.
Adnan Bukhari, 40, was detained by the FBI on Wednesday at his home in Vero Beach while agents searched the residence. He had been receiving flight engineering training at the Flight Safety International school there for months. CNN's Web site quoted his lawyer as saying he was cooperating with the FBI and denied any involvement in the terrorist attacks.
"He left the house voluntarily and at the time he was being cooperative with federal authorities," said Capt. Mary Hogan of the Indian River County Sheriff's Department, which assisted the FBI in the search. "He was taken to FBI offices in Miami."
Ameer Bukhari, a student pilot, was killed on Sept. 11, 2000, precisely one year to the day before Tuesday's suicide attacks, in a mid-air crash while trying to land a small plane at an airport in St. Lucie County, Fla.
There are some connections between Adnan Bukhari and the suspected terrorists. Kamfar once listed him as a personal reference on an apartment rental application. And his neighbor in Vero Beach was Omari. Omari, also a student pilot, had moved his family into the home several months ago because his wife and Adnan Bukhari's wife, who don't speak English, are good friends, according to Omari's landlord, Llonald Mixell.
After the FBI searched the Omari home, agents left a list of materials seized, including hair samples and air conditioning filters, Mixell said, adding that he dissuaded them from seizing the light bulbs,
apparently for fingerprints.
Adnan Bukhari's wife returned to Saudi Arabia Aug. 30, and the family's lease on the house ended the next day, landlord Paul Stimeling told the Associated Press. But Bukhari asked for a two-week extension, then for another two or three days.
Two employees at Rooms To Go, a furniture store in Vero Beach, said Bukhari made a hasty purchase as news of the bombing was breaking on a television in the showroom. Bukhari bought a $1,795 living room set within five minutes and said the furniture needed to be exported to Saudi Arabia immediately.
Kamfar and his family also disappeared quickly from their Vero Beach home. According to a neighbor, "they took all their stuff and put it out by the trash: clothes, furniture, pots and pans."
Meanwhile, on Aug. 16, Atta arrived at Palm Beach Flight Training to rent a plane, and quickly demonstrated his competence to a company pilot on a test flight. He returned the following afternoon, then again two days later. Each time, he had a different passenger.
According to the company's office manager, Andrew Laws, the only thing that struck workers as unusual was that each of Atta's outings lasted exactly 90 minutes. Each time, he paid the $133 fee in cash.
Last Friday night, Atta, Shehhi and an unidentified man spent 3 1/2 hours at a sports bar, Shuckums, in Hollywood, Fla. While Atta played video games, the other two had about five drinks each and appeared resistant to paying the $48 tab. The manager, Tony Amos, recalled yesterday that he inquired whether they could not afford the bill. Shehhi "looked at me with an arrogant look," Amos said. "He pulled out a wad of cash and put it on the bar table and said, 'There is no money issue. I am an airline pilot.'"
Such brashness, however, seems to have been uncharacteristic. The owner of a car rental company in Pompano Beach, Fla., from which Atta rented cars three times during the last month, said that he and Shehhi, who always accompanied him, were uncommonly polite. "He had very little accent and acted like he was a businessman," said Brad Warrick of Warrick's Rent-A-Car. "He always had a briefcase and books in the trunk."
After renting a Chevy Corsica for a week, Atta switched to a Ford Escort because it cost $10 less, Warrick recalled. Both vehicles have now been impounded by the FBI. At one point, Warrick said, Atta called from Venice, Fla., to say that the oil light had flickered on.
When he returned the car Sept. 9 -- two days before the attacks -- Atta reminded him about the oil light.
"The only thing out of the ordinary," Warrick said, "was that he was nice enough to let me know that the car needed an oil change. That was odd since he was planning to die in a matter of days."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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September 16, 2001, Los Angeles Times - The Michigan Daily, Suspect leaves trail for FBI to follow, Archived, diigo,
PARIS -- Mohamed Atta, a student of urban planning, militant Muslim and suicidal pilot, was a leader of his hijacking cell and shuttled among cities in the United States and abroad, offering investigators a trail that could lead to key managers of the conspiracy to attack America, according to records reviewed Saturday by the Los Angeles Times.
He traveled into the United States from countries including Germany and Spain, which have many active terrorist cells. In the months before the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he made two trips from Miami to Spain, the records showed.
Atta"s journeys fit a pattern taught by trainers for Osama bin Laden, the Saudi fugitive who runs a terrorist network from Afghanistan. The trainers teach followers to communicate instructions in person and to avoid telephones or any other means subject to electronic surveillance.
Tracing Atta"s journeys could lead investigators to middle-level handlers directing what U.S. officials describe as isolated cells of terrorists who infiltrated the United States.
They commandeered airliners Tuesday and piloted them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in the worst terrorist attack in American history. One side of the Pentagon was flattened, and the twin towers of the Trade Center were destroyed. The death toll is expected to exceed 5,000 people.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell says bin Laden is the prime suspect. U.S. and foreign counterterrorism specialists evaluating last week"s events point to disturbing developments in the bin Laden organization: The complexity of its cellular structure has increased. The significance of its targets has grown. Perhaps most disturbing, the sophistication of its technology has escalated year by year.
These experts fear that the logical next step is chemical, biological or nuclear terrorism. Intelligence sources say U.S. reconnaissance satellites recently spotted numerous dead animals in fields near one bin Laden camp, suggesting that the testing of chemical weapons might be underway.
Atta who studied urban planning, reportedly co-founded an Islamic prayer group at the Technical University in Hamburg, Germany, and shared an apartment there with two men, including a cousin, who would become hijackers in his terrorist cell, as well as with others linked to the bin Laden network.
He is said to have written a thesis on the restoration of the old quarter of the city of Aleppo, which took him to Syria, long regarded by the United States as a promoter of international terrorism. American officials have said the bin Laden adherents who bombed the USS Cole last year received material support from Iran by way of Syria.
Atta, older and better educated than other members of his cell, was responsible for paying the rent on the Hamburg apartment and used his credit card to lease cars for himself and at least one other hijacker in his cell.
He obtained a visa at the U.S. consulate in Berlin on May 18, 2000, and came to Newark, N.J., on June 3 on a flight from Prague, Czech Republic. He was admitted to the United States under a temporary visitor"s visa good for six months. On immigration documents, he listed his address as the Lexington Hotel in New York City.
Officials at the hotel said they have no evidence that Atta ever checked in.
He overstayed his visa by more than 30 days. Then, the records show, Atta took several trips that brought him to nations with terrorist cells where face-to-face conversations could frustrate the eavesdropping capability of electronic surveillance.
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September 13, 2011 [01:21 PM] Palm Beach Post, Encounters with 9/11 hijackers still haunt Palm Beach County residents, by Frank Cerabino, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer, Archived,
September 13, 2011 [01:21 PM] Palm Beach Post, Encounters with 9/11 hijackers still haunt Palm Beach County residents, by Frank Cerabino, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer, Archived,
Ten summers ago, Delray Beach police officer Tom Quinlan handled a service call about a dog bite in a condo elevator.
The caller wasn't the man who was bitten, but the owner of the little white dog.
"She was nervous that the guy would call animal control and they would take the dog away from her," said Quinlan, who is now retired. "She didn't want to get her dog in trouble."
So the officer went looking for the dog-bite victim, who had walked from the elevator into an apartment at the Delray Racquet Club.
"He answered the door. He had his right hand wrapped up," Quinlan said. "But he said it was fine. He didn't want to do anything about it."
Ringleader asked him about flying planes:
Willie Lee, 72, president of Aerial Crop Protection, says Mohamed Atta came to Belle Glade’s airfield and asked about crop dusters and chemicals.
She lived in the same building as the ‘muscle’ terrorists
Maria Siscar’s Delray Beach condo is below the unit rented by 9/11 hijackers in August 2001. ‘I’ve never really talked about this,’ she says. ‘I still look up at that apartment.’
The woman was relieved. Her dog was safe.
It seemed like one of those meaningless incidents until weeks later, after a band of 19 suicide hijackers conducted a coordinated attack against America on Sept. 11, 2001.
That's when Quinlan learned the man bitten by the dog wasn't just anybody. He was Moham ed Atta, the operational leader of those Al-Qaeda marauders, the man who piloted a jetliner into the World Trade Center's north tower.
And that's when the details of the officer's brief encounter with Atta took on new meaning.
"When I was there that day, I could see into the kitchen," Quinlan recalled. "There were four or five guys sitting around the kitchen table and they were looking at a blueprint. I thought they must have been engineers.
"In hindsight, you just grit your teeth."
Seen at gym, library, restaurants
There has been a lot of teeth-gritting in South Florida during the past 10 years, particularly in Palm Beach County. At least seven and possibly nine of the hijackers lived in Delray Beach in the months leading up to the attack. Three others lived in Boynton Beach.
They bided their time here, working out at a gym, eating at restaurants and using the public library's Internet access. And along the way, they crossed paths with people who never imagined the bold plot they were hatching in our midst.
For some, those memories have been distilled into relived "what if" moments, reflections on how history might have taken another route had these encounters turned out differently. And for others, it's just a painful memory of people they wish they never met.
Real estate hunt with hijackers
Gloria Irish spent three weeks of her life that summer driving Marwan al-Shehhi in her car. Irish, a real estate agent, was helping al-Shehhi find a place to live in Delray Beach.
"He was the only customer I ever had who called up to say he would be five minutes late," Irish said.
Before coming to Delray Beach, al-Shehhi, 23, had lived in Germany with Atta, met Osama bin Laden at a training camp in Afghanistan and spent time on Florida's west coast learning to fly while on a student visa. He had come to Delray Beach in the summer of 2001 to help Atta in "coordinating the arrival of most of the muscle hijackers in southern Florida," according to the 9/11 Commission Report. On Sept. 11, al-Shehhi would pilot a Boeing 767 airliner into the World Trade Center's south tower.
"He told me he was learning to fly," Irish said. "I remember one day, I asked him why he wasn't flying that day, and he said, 'There's too many clouds.' "
"And I thought, 'He's got a long way to go to be a commercial pilot.' "
Al-Shehhi was accompanied on these apartment hunting trips by Nawaf Alhazmi, 25, who would be one of the muscle hijackers on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon.
"I had never met Arabs before, and there they were," Irish said. "I wanted to tell them I was Jewish, but I didn't."
The hijackers never gave her a reason to suspect anything, she said. If only they had.
"Al-Shehhi told me he couldn't swim," she said. "I wish I drove my car off a bridge with them, because I swim real good."
Landlord's dream tenants
Al-Shehhi eventually found a place to his liking, a one-bedroom unit at The Hamlet Country Club condominiums in Delray Beach.
At first, the unit's owner, Jacqueline Allen, thought her new tenant would just be al-Shehhi, who was described to her over the phone as "a really nice young man" who had come to America to learn how to fly.
"I thought, 'Good for him,' " Allen remembered. "So many young people these days just want to collect welfare. And here was this young man who wants to learn how to fly planes and go back to his country."
And then she heard there would actually be two men, not one, in the one-bedroom apartment.
"So I started imagining college student keg parties," Allen said. "But then the agent told me told me it was probably going to be more like doilies and flowers. So I thought, 'Great! They're gay. That's good. They'll take care of the place.' "
They seemed like dream tenants. They paid the whole three-months' rent in cash upfront, and they left a month early. But after 9/11, they made Allen's life miserable.
"It's not been a fun time," she said. "I've had three sets of FBI agents come and talk to me. I've cooperated fully. I've had death threats, and I just had my second full complete IRS audit.
"I guess they need to make sure that Al-Qaeda hasn't dropped a bundle of money on me," she said.
But it has been only a bundle of aggravation, she said, especially from people who wonder how she could have rented to terrorists.
"They had Florida driver licenses. They had no criminal backgrounds," Allen said. "I'm a Realtor. I can't discriminate."
Chemical terror from the sky?
There's some anecdotal evidence to suggest that while the hijackers were in Palm Beach County waiting to execute their plan, they did research on another type of airborne terror.
Willie Lee, who flies agricultural crop-dusting planes, got tired of seeing the group of Arab men drive up in a rented van, showing up unannounced at Belle Glade's airfield to snoop around and ask questions.
"There was a different bunch every week, but Atta was here several times," Lee said.
"They'd park out by the gate and want to get on the airplane," Lee said. "I would never tell them nothing. They were asking the types of questions that other people didn't ask.
"One day, I asked them, 'Why do you want to know so much about these airplanes?' and they said, 'We want to spray back in our country.'
"And I said, 'What are you going to spray? Rocks? There's nothing there but rocks.' I had a bad feeling about them."
Lee said he called the now-defunct Belle Glade Police Department to run them off, but nothing ever happened.
"Had the police come out here and actually done something, that whole thing could have possibly been prevented," Lee said. "I think about it quite often. I sit in the office and start thinking about what could have been, or what should have been, and it bothers me."
After 9/11, Lee voiced his frustration to Rick Hornsby of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. Hornsby, who has since retired and run unsuccessfully for sheriff in Hendry County, said he looked into Lee's complaints.
"I checked with the Belle Glade Police Department, and nothing was recorded," Hornsby said. "Nothing was made official."
Hornsby doesn't doubt Lee's story about the visits by Atta and his crew. Hornsby's wife works at Airglades Airport in Clewiston, and the hijackers visited there, too, he said.
"They were in Clewiston looking at the crop dusters and asking about how much chemicals they can carry and how difficult it is to fly one," Hornsby said. "It makes my hair stand up just thinking about it.
"How ridiculously easy it would be for somebody to get in an ag plane and go over Dolphin Stadium with 80,000 people in it, and then spray them with some chemical."
Drugstore almost called 911
And there's other evidence to suggest that the hijackers may have been doing research on a chemical option while they were in South Florida that summer.
Gregg Chatterton was a pharmacist at Huber Drugs in downtown Delray Beach. He remembered a visit by Atta and a couple of the other hijackers. Atta had come to the drugstore looking for ointment for his hands.
"It was obvious that he dipped both his hands in bleach or something," Chatterton said. "You could see the line of demarcation on both hands."
Chatterton said he asked Atta what had happened, but the answers he got were evasive.
Chatterton told him to put a product named Acid Mantle on his hands. As Chatterton started walking away, Atta stopped him by sticking an arm across the pharmacist's chest.
"It was one of these martial arts moves, and my assistant looked at me and mouthed, 'Nine one one?' " Chatterton remembered.
A tense moment passed. Chatterton hesitated, and before he decided what to do, Atta told him he needed something else: cough medicine for one of his friends.
Chatterton wonders what would have happened if he had nodded to his assistant to call 911.
"The police would have arrived, and maybe this wouldn't have happened," Chatterton said.
"But what if I had stopped him, and he gave the orders to somebody else?" Chatterton said. "It might have been more than 3,000 people dying."
'Creeped out' by neighbors
Maria Siscar is still not completely over her close encounter with some of the hijackers. Siscar lives in the Delray Racquet Club condo directly below the unit that had been rented to Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmed Alnami, two of the muscle hijackers aboard the United Airlines jetliner that crashed near Shanksville, Pa.
"I get creeped out still. When I come home, I still look up at that apartment," she said. "So I changed my parking spot just so I won't have to look up at it. I know they're dead and gone and can't bother me, but once I looked up and I thought I saw the shades move."
Siscar 's most vivid memory of that summer is the time the future hijackers banged on her door, asking to come in.
They had dropped a shirt and a towel from their balcony onto the roof adjacent to Siscar 's condo. They wanted to get to the roof by climbing out a window in the woman's unit. But she was afraid to let them in.
After 9/11, she told the FBI about it. Agents, she said, discovered evidence that the men eventually used a grappling hook to shimmy down from their apartment to retrieve the shirt and towel. Why was it so important?
"The FBI vacuumed the roof and found a piece of paper under a piece of tile," Siscar said. "It was part of a plane ticket."
In Delray, sense of unease remains
The official record of what the hijackers did in South Florida is scant. Despite an intense investigation of their activities here, very little information has been made public. So even after 10 years, there's still nothing more than a disjointed collection of anecdotal snapshots from those who crossed their paths.
It's all somewhat unsettling, especially in Delray Beach, where the physical manifestation of this collective unease can still be found today in the collection of beret-and-ascot-wearing retirees who roam the city looking for the next batch of terrorists.
In the days after 9/11, Bob Banquer, a World War II veteran wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, went to the city's police department and proposed forming Delray Beach's own Homefront Security volunteer anti-terrorism squad.
Banquer had experience as a crime watch volunteer in his condo community of High Point.
"President Bush asked people to volunteer to help deter terrorism," Banquer said. "So I got a hold of four or five World War II veterans and we started Homefront Security."
For the past 10 years, the blue-shirted Homefront Security details have been a fixture in the city. They roam in pairs with their radios set to the police frequency as they look for suspicious activity at city hall, the water plant, the library and about a dozen other places where terrorists might be lurking.
Banquer, 89, said he's getting a little too old to do the patrols. So he has become an adviser to the group, which has required some new volunteers to keep the details staffed.
"Two left for dementia, one passed away and another is in a nursing home," said Maj. Martin Tencer, one of the volunteer coordinators for the police department.
In the decade since 9/11, the anti-terrorism volunteers have reported on some suspicious activities, but nothing that turned out to be the work of terrorists.
"They found a pedophile at the library and lots of suspicious packages left at the railroad," Tencer said. "Every time there was a problem, the bomb squad came out."
So how much longer is Delray Beach going to be operating its anti-terrorist detail?
"It will be here forever," Tencer said. "You see how the world is changing; people are uneasy."
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