World Trade Centre Assignment

. 'Bin Laden is a product of the U.S. spy agencies, according to an article in the Tribune de Genève by Richard Labévière, writer of the book Les dollars de la terreur, les États Unis et les islamistes.

The first contact with Bin Laden was in 1979, when the new graduate from the Univ. of Jedah got in touch with the U.S. embassy in Ankara, Turkey. With the help of the CIA and the U.S. Armed Forces intelligence services he began to organize in the early 1980s and network to raise money and to recruit fighters for the Afghan mujahidins that were fighting the Soviets. He did this from the city of Peshawar in Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan.

Part of these activities were financed with the production and sale of morphine, the base of heroin. This was the beginning of today Al Qaida (the base) network led by Bin Laden. Indeed the chickens are coming home to roost for the CIA and U.S. bosses.

Mohamed Atta: profile of a terrorist

Special report: Terrorism in the US

Sunday September 16, 2001
The Observer

Atta is suspected of piloting the plane that hit the World Trade Centre's north tower.

Date of birth: 1.7.68. Believed to be Saudi or Egyptian though carrying UAE passport.

Lived in a flat on Marienstrasse in the Harburg suburb of Hamburg for eight years from 1992. Shipbuilding student at Hamburg Technical University, where he requested a prayer room for Muslims. Spoke excellent German and patronised Sharky's Billiard Bar. Graduated in early 2000 and moved to Broward County on Florida's Atlantic coast shortly afterwards. Moved to Venice, Florida, in June 2000, where he studied at Huffman Aviation light aircraft training school. The course cost $10,000. Eager but not well-liked, according to school director.

By November 2000 had passed basic FAA tests and was learning to fly big jets at SimCenter, Opa-Locka, near Miami. Spent $1,500 on three hours in a 727 simulator over 29 and 30 December 2000. Instructor said lessons gave him 'good feel for manoeuvring airplane around'.

Atta's movements in early 2001 are unclear, but at some stage returned to Hamburg. Returned to the US on 2 May. Moved to Coral Springs, then possibly to Bimini Motel Apartments, Ocean Drive, Hollywood. Took four practice flights from a firm at Palm Beach County Airport in late August. Owned a 1983 red Pontiac. Polite and smart. Liked sports shirts, slacks and black jeans. By August hiring cars for long drives.

Bought his ticket on Flight 11 from an American Airlines website on 28 August, using his own Visa card and a frequent flier number set up three days before. He bought a ticket for Abdul Rahman al-Omari at the same time with whom he travelled to Portland, Maine.

CNN) -- U.S. authorities describe Mohamed Atta as a terrorist who helped hijack American Airlines Flight 11, then flew it into the north tower of the World Trade Center September 11 in the first of four deadly attacks against America.

But in the Abdeen section of Cairo, Egypt, where Atta grew up, the suspected hijacker is described as "a good boy" who was always at the top of his class.

"If he could do something like that ... then I could suspect anyone, even my brother, or my own hands," said Mohamed Hassan Attiya, a former classmate of Atta's.

Attiya said Atta was polite and "on the right path" toward his goal of becoming an engineer.

Mohamed Kamel Khamis saw the Atta family almost daily for 14 years. He runs an auto repair shop below the apartment where the Atta family lived until 1992.

Khamis said Atta was very introverted and was considered a good boy in the neighborhood.

He appeared to be an ordinary graduate student, but German authorities said they believe Atta joined other Islamic fundamentalists to form a terrorist group.

A German news report said that in late 1999 Atta and two other suspected hijackers reported their passports had been stolen.

The German Interior Ministry said that may have been a plan to get rid of evidence they had traveled to Afghanistan.

Atta used his new passport to obtain a tourist visa for the United States on May 18, 2000, European government sources told CNN.

Less than a month later, he flew to Prague, Czech Republic, where he stayed for 24 hours before leaving for the United States.

U.S. and European intelligence sources told CNN Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent during the detour. Iraq has repeatedly denied having anything to do with the plot.

A few weeks later, Atta and others suspected in the plot went to Norman, Oklahoma, where they toured a flight school.

"They wanted the professional pilot course, which does result in a commercial pilot's license for a single and multi-engine land[ing]," said Shirley Franklin of the Airman Flight School.

Atta and the others took flying lessons from July until December 2000. They kept a low profile, living in several short-term rental apartments, opening e-mail accounts and buying cellular phones.

In January 2001, Atta made the first of two trips to Spain. Intelligence officials told CNN that during one of the two trips, a senior Iraqi intelligence official was also in the country. Investigators do not know if they met.

An airplane mechanic in Florida said Atta came to his airstrip twice in February to look at a crop-dusting plane. Investigators told CNN Atta also went to a Homestead, Florida, bank to ask about getting a loan to buy a crop-duster.

In April, Atta was arrested in Broward County, Florida, for driving without a license. He got a license a week later.

In June, Atta flew to Las Vegas, Nevada, where investigators believe he met with other hijackers who were training on the West Coast.

In July, he went back to Spain for two weeks. There are reports that Atta went to a prison in southern Spain, where he asked to visit an Algerian being held on murder charges. The request was denied.

He returned to the United States after almost two weeks. During his trip, he reportedly drove more than 1,200 miles in his rental car.

On August 12, Atta flew to Las Vegas a second time and investigators believe he again met with other hijackers. Authorities do not know if this was a rehearsal for the attacks.

When he returned to Florida, Atta rented a car that he, or his co-conspirators, drove almost 3,000 miles. Investigators are not sure where he went.

The Boston Globe reported that in early September Atta's rental car was recorded on closed-circuit video at Boston's Logan Airport, where Flight 11 originated.

On September 7, Atta was seen in a bar in Hollywood, Florida, with Marwan al-Shehri, who had come from Hamburg with him. The men were drinking and boasting about being pilots for American Airlines.

The last picture of Atta was taken on the morning of September 11, at the airport in Portland, Maine. Atta had just cleared airport security before boarding a flight for Boston where he would catch Flight 11.

Atta's father, attorney Mohamed Alameer Atta, said his son hated suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and would have never have joined his organization, al Qaeda.

The elder Atta said his son was framed. He said he talked to his son after the attacks and believes he was later killed by Israeli intelligence forces.

Preliminary findings indicate that Mohamed Atta fits the "puritanical compulsive" profile. One of the most pertinent diagnostic indicators in media reports is Peter Finn's observation that "[Atta] seemed more serious and aloof to those who had known him before" ("A fanatic’s quiet path to terror," Washington Post, Sept. 22, 2001, p. A1). Atta's seriousness likely reflects a highly conscientious, obsessive-compulsive character pattern, whereas his reported aloofness is probably indicative of a solitary, deeply introverted schizoid tendency. This "true believer" personality amalgam stands in stark contrast to the grandiose, malignant narcissism of a mastermind such as Osama bin Laden, who seems motivated by personal dreams of glory and, unlike Atta, fundamentally lacking a coherent set of core values.

These clinical impressions are generally confirmed by John Cloud's "Atta’s Odyssey" in the Oct. 8, 2001 issue of Time magazine. This article, rich with psychodiagnostically relevant observations, offers copious evidence of obsessive-compulsive and schizoid tendencies, along with suggestive evidence of avoidant and masochistic traits.

There is no evidence of antisocial, sadistic, or narcissistic tendencies in Atta's profile, and very little evidence of true paranoia beyond the socially constructed "shared delusional elements" that one would expect of someone with an ideologically extreme, fundamentalist belief system and value orientation.

The syndrome of malignant narcissism, originated by psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg, has been widely used by political psychologists to characterize leaders who pose a threat to civil society, political stability, and world order.

It is plausible that the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 acts of terrorism at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC -- be it Osama bin Laden or someone else -- fits this profile.

The core components of the syndrome are pathological narcissism, antisocial features, paranoid traits, and unconstrained aggression.

1. Pathological narcissism

The syndrome of puritanical (i.e., fundamentalist) compulsiveness, described by personality theorist Theodore Millon, is less well known among political psychologists. These individuals are “austere, self-righteous, [and] highly controlled.” Their “intense anger and resentment . . . is given sanction, at least as they see it, by virtue of their being on the side of righteousness and morality.” (Theodore Millon, Disorders of Personality, 1996, p. 520)

The world of puritanical compulsives is dichotomized into good and evil, saints and sinners—and they arrogate for themselves the role of savior. They seek out common enemies in their relentless pursuit of mission. Puritanical compulsives are prone to vent their hostility through “sadistic displacements” and their “puritanical’s wrath becomes the vengeful sword of righteousness, descended from heaven to lay waste to sin and iniquity.” Of greater concern in politics, puritanicals instinctively seek ever-greater degrees of fundamentalism, “because literalism makes it much easier to find someone who deserves not only to be punished but to be punished absolutely.” (Theodore Millon and Roger Davis, Personality Disorders in Modern Life, 2000, p. 178)

This kind of flaming righteousness is often rooted in a caring but controlling, virtuous but moralistic upbringing. Such child-rearing practices can breed adults who “displace anger and insecurity by seeking out some position of power that allows them to become a socially sanctioned superego for others,” whose “swift judgment . . . conceals a sadistic and self-righteous joy.” (Millon and Davis, cited above, p. 184)

A Fanatic's Quiet Path to Terror
Rage Was Born in Egypt, Nurtured in Germany, Inflicted on U.S.
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 22, 2001; Page A01

HAMBURG, Germany -- In 1995, shortly before a three-month trip to Egypt, the country of his birth and upbringing, Mohamed Atta grew a beard. A beard is traditionally a sign of a devout Muslim man, but in this case it was also a defiantly political gesture, chosen to register disgust at the secular elite that ruled his homeland.

The Egyptian government was cracking down viciously on Islamic fundamentalists at the time. But Atta informed two German traveling companions that he would not be cowed by the country's "fat cats," who he believed were criminalizing religious traditionalists while bowing shamefully to the West in foreign and economic policies.

The beard "was a reaction," recalled Volker Hauth, a fellow student at Hamburg's Technical University, who traveled to Cairo with Atta in August 1995. "He was saying, 'I'm willing to show my religious convictions.' . . . He talked openly about the internal political situation in Egypt. That was his main topic."

As investigators around the world piece together the mechanics of the attacks on New York and Washington, they are expanding the known biography of one key suspect, Mohamed Atta, the alleged pilot of the first plane to slam into the World Trade Center.

In the details of his life are clues, tentative to be sure, about the making of a suicidal fanatic -- a devout, highly intelligent and diligent student who lived and moved easily within Western society while secretly hating it.

Acquaintances say the locus of Atta's rage, the subject that most animated him, was Egypt and the tension between its Western-oriented government and its Islamic fundamentalists. But at some point that appears to have expanded into anger about the United States' power in the world, anger strong enough, it seems, to have placed him at the controls of the jet.

The Sept. 11 attacks have laid bare the existence of a cadre of young men like Atta, ready to plot their own deaths years in advance to serve a cause, and normal enough on the outside to attract no special attention from neighbors and colleagues. No one knows how many there are, but initial investigations suggest that they come from many places -- Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and the Arab diaspora community in Hamburg.

Identifying them and understanding their motivation and psychological development will be a key task in the war that the Bush administration has declared on terrorism.

Born 33 years ago in the town of Kafr el Sheikh, Atta grew up the son of a middle-class lawyer. The family, including Atta's three sisters, moved to Cairo where Atta's 65-year-old father still practices. The family was comfortable and able to afford a getaway home on the Mediterranean coast.

In 1985, Atta entered the architecture school in the engineering department at Cairo University. The Muslim Brotherhood and other religion-based political organizations are banned in Egypt, but the beliefs they represent show up in many seemingly unlikely institutions. One of them was the engineering department.

In 1990, after finishing his studies in architecture, Atta joined what is called an "engineering syndicate," a professional or trade group. Like the school that trained many of its engineers, the syndicate was an unofficial base for the Muslim Brotherhood, where it recruited and propagated its ideas, including the demonization of the United States.

In an interview this week with the Egyptian newspaper Al Hayat, Atta's father said that despite a politicized environment in study and work, his son was not political. The slight, short young man, he said, was in fact "soft as a breeze."

"The police never knocked on our door to question Mohamed's activities or to warn him," the father said, referring to a common practice by Egyptian police who warn parents about activist children.

Despite the disavowal of politics, Atta's father's language, in a brief interview with The Washington Post, was stridently political. "Egypt is a hypocrite and the U.S. is a hypocrite," he said before slamming his front door. "We are people who don't have hypocrisy. Oil companies rule the U.S. with power and [are] killing people." He didn't say who he meant by "we."

After finishing his studies in 1990 -- it is unclear if he obtained an architecture degree -- Atta worked for a couple of years with a German company in Cairo before obtaining a visa to study urban planning at the Technical University in Hamburg, beginning in October 1992.

That same year, an Islamic campaign to overthrow the government in Egypt intensified, sparking harsh repression by the political leaders. Atta discussed his country's problems, but with no more fervor than other students, colleagues in Germany recall.

Smart and hard-working, he settled on an academic specialty of the preservation of the Islamic quarters of old cities, particularly Aleppo in Syria. Later Aleppo would become the subject of his thesis.

In December 1992, Atta began working up to 19 hours a week at Plankontor, an urban planning firm in Hamburg, earning around $850 a month.

"He was very, very religious," said Joerg Lewin, one of the firm's partners, who noted that Atta regularly prayed on the floor of the office by a large draftsman's table. "My impression is that he became more and more intense."

Atta, Lewin said, wouldn't eat cookies laid out for people in the office without studying the contents label to make sure there was no pork-based gelatin in the ingredients, which would violate Islamic strictures against eating pork.

Matthias Frinken, another Plankontor partner, noted that "he was very critical of capitalistic Western development schemes." And Lewin said that unlike other foreign students, Atta said he had no desire to stay in Germany but wanted to return to Egypt with new skills.

He appears to have had a sometimes ascetic existence. Nothing has come to light to suggest that he had a romantic life. He took multiple jobs, working for a cleaning firm, and buying and selling cars part time to earn extra cash.

In 1995, Atta took six months off from Plankontor. Half of that period, Atta told his office mates, he would use for a pilgrimage to Mecca, which every Muslim is expected to make once in a lifetime. It's unclear if he actually did it.

The other half was for a three-month study trip to Cairo, sponsored by the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, the equivalent of the U.S. Agency for International Development. In his application for a coveted place in the program, Atta wrote that he was interested in the relationship of Third World countries to First World countries, according to an official at CDS International, which supervises such study trips for the government.

Hauth and another German student, Ralph Bodenstein, went along on the trip. Atta was still a member of the engineering syndicate and he took the two Germans to its eating club. Hauth recalled in an interview that Atta did nothing during the trip that suggested he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the group's influence in the club was obvious even to the German.

The talk about government oppression left the fellow students feeling that Atta "was searching for justice," Hauth said. Hauth now theorizes that Atta had reached a line in his political and religious development.

Hauth noted that the quiet student he knew in Germany was vastly more at home in Cairo. "His communication abilities awoke, with children, with old men, with professors, with people in government," Hauth said.

Upon his return, Atta spent six months, along with Hauth and Bodenstein, preparing a report, which focused on urban development in Egypt. The report was deemed "excellent" by CDS.

By this time, 1996, the various men who German police say would form a terrorist cell in Hamburg and share an apartment were beginning to appear in that city and others in Germany. Atta and others rented a walk-up apartment on Marien Street in Hamburg. Neighbors recall constant gatherings of men there in the evenings.

In the summer of 1997, after leaving Plankontor, Atta apparently dropped out of school for 15 months, a gap that remains unexplained. When he reappeared in October 1998, his mustache-less beard had become thick and long. He founded an Islamic prayer and study group at the university in January 1999; its computers have now been seized by police.

"I thought it was because he was working hard on his thesis," said Professor Dittmar Machule, Atta's academic supervisor. "It could be, though, that he was not the same. He studied very quickly and very rigorously. He gave the impression that he wanted to get his work over and done with."

Other evidence has surfaced to suggest something big was being planned. German media have reported that Atta and two other Hamburg plotters reported their passports lost or stolen within two months of one another in 1999. German police speculate that they may have wanted new documents, without entry and exit stamps from countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan, before applying for U.S. visas in 2000.

Between June and August 1999, Atta worked with university architect Chrilla Wendt at the suggestion of Machule to improve the German in his thesis; although Atta's spoken German was good, it was far from perfect, and his written German was flawed.

"He was a very tight person," said Wendt, who worked with him side by side two hours a week that summer. "I cannot remember him smiling."

On the front of his thesis, when it was finally ready, Atta included a quote from the Koran: "My Prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death belong to Allah, the Lord of the worlds."

The presentation of the thesis in October 1999 was followed by an oral examination by Machule and an independent assessor, who happened to be a woman. After deciding to award Atta his degree, the equivalent of a master's with highest honors, both academics congratulated him, extending their hands. Atta took Machule's hand but declined to shake the woman's.

Hauth recalled that the only time he saw Atta show any interest in a woman was in Aleppo, where the pair met a self-assured and beautiful Palestinian working in a planning office. Atta, with clear regret, told Hauth back at their hotel that she wouldn't be suitable because she was too emancipated.

By May 2000, his new Egyptian passport containing a U.S. visa obtained in Berlin, the beard he grew for religious reasons shaved off, and flush with money beyond his known means, Atta was ready to move.

He traveled to Prague in the Czech Republic in early June and 24 hours later took a flight to Newark. In the next year, he learned how to fly aircraft in Florida. But during this period, he returned to Europe twice.

The first time was in January 2001 when he flew from Miami to Madrid. He returned to the United States six days later, apparently with a new visa despite having overstayed by one month on his previous trip. On July 7 he flew to Spain again for 12 days, renting a car and visiting the northeastern Catalan resort of Salou. Spanish press reports say he left the hotel where he first checked in, trading it for a more modest hostel, whose room he inspected before deciding to stay.

The Friday night before the attacks, Atta and two other men -- one of them another suspected hijacker, Marwan Al-Shehhi -- spent 3 1/2 hours at a sports bar in Hollywood, Fla., called Shuckums. Atta played video games, a pursuit out of line with fundamentalist beliefs. But the manager on duty that night has said that he doesn't recall seeing Atta drink alcohol.

A Mission to Die For

Thousands of dead remain unaccounted for in the still smouldering rubble of New York's World Trade Centre, nearly two months after the murderous attack on the twin towers.

Somewhere among them, the remnants of a man described by an old friend as "a very nice person, really, a very delicate person…this is the Mohamed I knew".

The Mohamed he knew was Mohamed Atta, the 33-year-old suspected ringleader of 19 suicide hijackers whose last act took thousands of innocent lives and raised the frightening prospect of future conflict between Islam and the West.

What drove Atta, this "very nice, very delicate" but superficially unremarkable man, to commit an act of such abominable evil? Was he insane, or were his motives and ruthless determination rooted somewhere in his background?

Four Corners reporter Liz Jackson goes in search of an answer by following Mohamed Atta's life, from his beginnings in a middle class family in a north Egyptian village, to his end in the burning north tower of the World Trade Centre.

Jackson's journey begins in Cairo where the schism between the Middle East and the west is immediately apparent. Anger at the US translates into a blank refusal by Atta's old friends and student colleagues to believe he was involved in September 11. To them it's all American propaganda.

The picture that emerges of Atta from his Cairo days is one of a diligent and moderate scholar, which serves only to underline his gradual transformation from student of architecture to destroyer of one of the Western world's greatest buildings.

Jackson follows Atta to Germany, at a time of a brutal crackdown on Islamic fundamentalists at home in Egypt. In Hamburg, Atta's fellow students and teachers in urban planning speak of a highly political young man — who became more overtly religious.

In the US, Jackson traces Atta's last months through the eyes of the people he encountered. Here, the flying school trainee cut a less ambiguous figure. "He was just an asshole, first class," says a man who knew him there.

"I can see him striding towards me, towards the aircraft and the thing that struck me was that he had a terribly set expression on his face. Totally emotionless, cold eyes," a fellow trainee recalls.

Atta spent his last night at the Comfort Inn in Portland, Maine. From there he took the short trip to the airport where he was last photographed by a security camera taking a connecting flight to board the plane he hijacked in Boston.

Four Corners has the stories of the people who knew Atta, previously unpublished photos of him and internal police documents naming him as a suspect less than 24 hours after the September 11 attack.

Mohamed El Amir, the father of Mohamed Atta, denies his son's involvement in the attack on the World Trade Center. (ABCNEWS.com)

Not My Son

Alleged Terrorist's Father Denies Son's Involvement in Attacks

C A I R O, Egypt, Sept. 18 — The father of Mohamed Atta expressed disbelief that his son could have been one of the suicide terrorists who forced a plane into the World Trade Center. Yet, in an exclusive interview with ABCNEWS, Mohamed El Amir confirmed the photograph provided by authorities was, in fact, that of his son.

FBI releases hijackers' backgrounds

Associated Press

Last Updated: Sept. 14, 2001

Washington - Most came from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, two of the Arab countries most friendly to the United States.

They said they were pilots, or airplane mechanics, or students, or tourists. Many claimed to work for Saudi Arabian Airlines, a government air carrier.

They betrayed not a word to their neighbors about what drove their suicide missions: commandeering airliners and flying them into two of America's most treasured landmarks.

"They didn't talk to anyone about anything at all," said Azzan Ali, a fellow student at a Florida flight school of two men named by the FBI as hijackers.

The FBI on Friday released names of the 19 men it identified as the hijackers of the four planes used in the attacks.

Some of the men left little trace of their time in America. Others stayed for years, taking flight classes, buying cars, moving from apartments to boarding houses to rented homes.

Several clustered around Mohamed Atta, a square-jawed 33-year-old pilot who ended up on the first plane to smash into New York's World Trade Center.

Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, 23, trained as pilots together in Florida and stayed together in the home of a former flight school worker in the summer of last year. Those who came across them said they called each other "cousin" - the two are believed to be from the United Arab Emirates - and kept to themselves.

Al-Shehhi was in the United States on a tourist visa. Like Atta, he had a federal pilot's license.

Atta and Al-Shehhi also were together in Hamburg, Germany. Authorities there say they were part of an extremist group that planned attacks against high-profile American targets. The two also took classes at a technical school there.

Ziad Jarrahi had a pilot's license listing a Hamburg address. Jarrahi was on United Airlines Flight 93, a plane hijacked from a Newark, N.J., to San Francisco route that crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

When it came time for their fateful flights, Atta and Al-Shehhi split up. Al-Shehhi was on United Flight 175, the plane which hit the second World Trade Center tower. The plane carrying Atta hit the first.

Authorities believe Atta flew from Portland, Maine, to Boston on Tuesday morning with another hijacker, Abdulaziz Alomari.

Alomari also took flight training in Florida. He told his landlord that he was a Saudi Arabian Airlines pilot getting more training at FlightSafety International, the flight school in Vero Beach where John F. Kennedy Jr. trained. A federal pilot's license for an Abdulrahman Saeed Alomari lists the airline's address in Saudi Arabia.

"I can't confirm there was any link between any of these individuals and Saudi Arabian Airlines," airline spokesman Thomas Quinn said. "There's been no indication to this office that these individuals were our employees."

Neighbors say Alomari was a family man. Living with him in the $1,400- a-month home were his wife and four school-age children. Neighbor Jim Smith said he noticed that when school started last month, Alomari's wife and children were gone. Alomari moved out on Sept. 3.

With Atta on the first plane was Waleed M. Alshehri, 25. Records show he had been in the United States since at least 1994, when he got a Social Security number and a Florida driver's license. In 1997, he graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida with a commercial pilot's training degree; he also has a commercial pilot's license.

Alshehri gave birthdates from 1974 to 1979 on various documents. Records show he lived in several different apartments in a complex in Daytona Beach, Fla., where Embry-Riddle is based. He also may have lived for a time at a boarding house in Vienna, Va., a Washington suburb.

FBI agents interviewed current tenants at the house, which is about three blocks from the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters.

Abdul Latif Darab, a native of Afghanistan who has lived in the United States since 1982, said he told the FBI that Alshehri had not lived at the address for at least the past 14 months.

Darab said learned from the landlord that Alshehri was from Saudi Arabia. "He told the landlord he was going back home and that his father was a Saudi diplomat," Darab said.

Another hijacker who may have had a commercial pilot's license was Hani Hanjour, who was aboard the American Airlines flight which slammed into the Pentagon. Federal records show a Hani Hanjoor got a commercial pilot's license in 1999, listing a Saudi Arabian address.

CORRECTION:In our Sept. 24, 2001 issue, Time described hijacker Abdulaziz Alomari as a student at FlightSafety Academy in Vero Beach, Fla. and as the father of a family that once lived there. The hijacker identified by that name by the FBI was neither.

Mohamed Atta poses a puzzle, and Abdulaziz Alomari poses a bigger one. Until now the standard profile of Islamic martyrs was: young, nothing to lose and fanatically, hermetically Muslim. Atta, 33, flouted Islamic morality by slugging down vodka like a sailor. And as for Alomari, 28: How does a man—no brainwashed boy dreaming of virgins in paradise but a man in his prime —vaporize that life by flying a plane into a building? Why? Why now?

There are many possible answers, but few feel sufficient. Theologically, some Middle Eastern sheiks justify suicide bombings on the basis of Muslim medieval traditions, although most of their colleagues worldwide disagree. Politically, campaigns against Muslims in Bosnia, Albania, Chechnya and Israel create a nationalist desperation that can draw even secularists to pan-Islamic dreamer-schemers like bin Laden, especially when they can offer a checkbook and organizational savvy. Then there is globalization. When Islam stopped gaining territory in the Middle Ages, its thinkers developed mechanisms for coexisting with a permanent Western other. But to new theorists like bin Laden, globalization represents the end of that détente and the start of a hobnailed Western victory march, justifying extreme actions in self-defense.

Philip Lamy, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Castleton College in Vermont, further probes that world view: "The fear that these changes will eradicate their language. Their religion. Their way of life. Westernization as the major lifestyle. Capitalism as the major economic system. English as the major language. Tourism as a major industry. These things scare them. This is not just a madman's mind-set."

No. Perhaps this is a definition of a terrifying kind of sanity, whether we want to wrap our minds around it or not. We can parse the lives of the suicides into subatomic bits and still not arrive at a why that we can accept. But it has happened once now. No peculiarity emerges from their tales, in character or plot, to indicate that it may not happen again. —By David Van Biema.

John Hooper, Hamburg
Sunday September 23, 2001
The Observer

While he was visiting the Syrian town of Aleppo in late 1994 and early 1995, Mohamed Atta met a young Palestinian woman called Amal. She worked in a planning bureau there, so she had plenty in common with Atta, who was studying town planning.

'I got the impression he was interested in her,' said Volker Hauth, a fellow student travelling with Atta at the time. Amal was attractive and self-confident. She observed the Muslim niceties, taking taxis to and from the office so as not to come into close physical contact with men on the buses. But, said Hauth, she was 'emancipated' and 'challenging'.

It seemed, too, that she was as interested in Atta as he was in her. Atta was Egyptian and Hauth last week recalled how Amal had teased his friend with one of those half-admiring, half-provoking asides that women reserve for men they find attractive. 'All Egyptians are Pharaohs,' she is said to have joked.

'He spoke about her back in the hotel. But he said she had a quite different orientation and that the emancipation of the young lady did not fit. He told this with regret,' said Hauth.

The story of Amal is the closest thing to romance in the austerely dutiful life of the pivotal figure in the inquiry into the attacks on New York and Washington.

Atta, 33, was the first of the alleged conspirators to enrol at the university on the outskirts of Hamburg which investigators believe was at the heart of the plot. It was he who remained throughout at the flat where at least three of the others lived. It was he who headed the university religious association to which they are all thought to have belonged. And on 11 September - investigators believe - it was Atta who led the attack on the World Trade Centre, piloting American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower at 8.45am.

In many respects, though, he led not one life, but two. He repeatedly switched names, nationalities and personalities. If in Egypt, and later in the US, he was Mohamed Atta, then at the Technical University of Harburg, he was Mohamed el-Amir. For the university authorities, he was an Egyptian, yet for his landlord, as for the US authorities, he was from the United Arab Emirates. And while it is not hard to see Atta, whose face gazes out from the passport photograph released by the FBI, as that of the mass murderer of Manhattan, el-Amir was a shy, considerate man who endeared himself to Western acquaintances.

Such indeed was the gulf between the two that some people, notably his father, insisted last week that Mohamed Atta's identity must have been stolen by the hijackers' leader. That view was given some credibility by a German press report, not denied by the government, that he and two other Hamburg suspects reported in 1999 that their passports had been stolen. However, the same report quoted the Interior Ministry as saying that the reason the three men did so was to obtain new passports, free of stamps that might have jeopardised their chances of obtaining US visas.

What The Observer's investigation into his past has revealed is that Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, to give him the full name under which he registered in Germany, underwent a visible process of radicalisation. He may have led a double life, but he was no 'sleeper'. Indeed Mohamed el-Amir, the student, was much more overtly fundamentalist than the shadowy Mohamed Atta.

Atta was born at Kafr el-Sheikh in the Nile Delta and brought up in the slightly down-at-heel Cairo suburb of Giza. His father was a lawyer and he studied architecture at the university of Cairo between 1985 and 1990.

Hauth, who travelled with him to Egypt, observed last week that Atta came from precisely that traditionally minded sector of the intelligentsia which was most outraged, and prejudiced, by the opening to the West that President Anwar Sadat initiated before his assassination in 1981.

When Atta arrived in Harburg 11 years later to study for the equivalent of an MSc in town planning, he left behind him a country once again drifting into turmoil as Islamic fundamentalists mounted a campaign to overthrow the government. In October 1992, the month Atta enrolled, it was reported from Cairo that terrorists would henceforth be tried before military courts. That decision set the stage for a brutal trial of strength marked by savage attacks on the one hand and, on the other, by widespread torture and the imprisonment of thousands of people without charge or trial.

Atta made no secret of where his sympathies lay. He had graduated from a faculty that was a hotbed of fundamentalist agitation and gone on to join the Engineers Syndicate, one of three professional associations controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Hauth said his acquaintance was appalled by what he saw as the creation of a new class of Egyptian 'Fat Cats'.

'One of the main points of his critique was the contrast between a few rich people and the mass of people with barely enough to survive'.

In Germany, Atta was soon able to turn his architectural training, and specifically his drawing skills, to advantage. Just two months after his arrival, he secured a part-time job with Plankontor, a planning consultancy in the trendy Hamburg district of Ottensen.

Helga Rake, one of the partners at Plankontor, remembered him as 'introverted and very reserved', but also as 'flexible' and 'very conscientious'.

She added: 'He prayed in the office. We'd never had anyone do that before.' At midday, the man they knew as Mohamed el-Amir, would break off whatever he was doing to kneel down beside his drawing board. 'He was very critical of capitalistic, Western development schemes,' said another partner, Matthias Frinken. 'He was critical of big hotels and office buildings.'

But there was little to suggest that Atta was any different from millions of other devout, peaceful, religiously conservative yet socially aware Muslims.

Professor Dittmar Machule, who supervised his thesis and also knew him as el-Amir, said: 'At the beginning, we spoke often about how religions can co-exist. He was very intellectually engaged with this problem.'

A photograph taken of Atta on a student trip to Istanbul in the summer of 1994 shows him clean-shaven. But a year later, when he returned to Cairo, Atta had acquired that distinctive beard which fringes the chin and leaves the upper lip free of hair which, in North Africa, is usually the sign of a committed fundamentalist.

It is at this point that odd gaps begin to open up in his life and the first evidence appears of his dissembling. Helga Rake at Plankontor said that he was absent for half of 1995 and that he said he had taken time out to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and return home. But Hauth said that neither on their subsequent visit to Cairo, nor at any time over the next few months, did the Egyptian mention a pilgrimage. This is all the more extraordinary given the German's keen interest in religion. 'It was the very basis of our relationship', he said.

In June 1997, Atta was laid off by Plankontor. The partners had bought a CAD system and his draughtsmanship was not needed. 'When he was given his last sum of money, he got too much from us and he sent it back,' recalled Frinken. 'He said that he hadn't earned it and he didn't want any more'.

Machule said Atta then took a long break from his studies. The recollections of others show it could only have been in the period from the end of the academic year in 1997 to the start of the academic year in 1998 - a gap of 15 months which the Egyptian explained to his professor as being for family reasons.

It is striking that Atta's absence coincided with an upsurge in violence directed against foreigners by an extremist group, Jama'ah al-Islamiyah, known to be linked to Osama bin Laden. It is even more striking that the victims of the first such attack, on a tourist bus in Cairo, which left nine dead and 11 injured, were Germans.

By the time Atta returned to Hamburg he was a changed man. Hannelore Haase, who owned the shop at the corner of the street where Atta shared a flat with two other Arab men remembered all three wearing traditional garb of baggy trousers and flowing kaftans. Chrylla Wendt, Machule's assistant, said he now had a thick, bushy beard. 'He was more serious,' said the professor.

Hauth, who lost contact with Atta after he left the university at the end of 1995, knew a man who could even laugh at jokes about Arab dictators. But Wendt said: 'I cannot remember him smiling.'

She had plenty of opportunity to study Atta at close quarters, for she had agreed to go through his thesis with him, correcting his German. Starting in June 1999, they met 'at least once a week' in her narrow office and sat side by side at her desk.

But when the time came to look at the last chapter, Atta refused to go through it with her and Wendt believes he had found their physical intimacy unbearable. The thesis was finished. But before it was submitted, Atta slipped in an additional page at the front. It had on it a verse from the Koran.

'Say. My prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death are [all] for Allah, the Lord of the worlds.'

Machule shrugged it off as the idiosyncrasy of a devout man. His thesis was what mattered, and it was brilliant. Atta got a 1.0 - the highest possible mark.

Wendt remembered how, when the examiners had finished their deliberations, Machule walked out to congratulate Atta. An outside, female examiner followed suit and extended her hand. Atta refused to take it.

Although he remained enrolled, no one on campus seems ever to have seen him again. He next reappears this year making an unexplained 10-day visit to Spain. The Observer has seen hotel records which confirm that Atta spent at least one night in the eastern resort town of Salou in mid-July.

The FBI said that Atta flew to Madrid's Barajas airport from Miami on 9 July. His first step on arrival was to pick up a rental car which he had previously reserved over the internet.

Atta spent his last night in the Montsant Hostal in Salou, where he paid with his Visa card and registered under his own name. His Hyundai Accent car was returned to Madrid airport on 18 July with some 1,250 miles on the clock.

On 16 August, back in Florida, he rented a single-engined plane from a company in Palm Beach. He made a test flight to demonstrate his competence and then returned twice more, each time with a different passenger.

In the minds of all but the most cynical or sadistic terrorists, there has to be an element of wilful schizophrenia - a readiness to murder people in the name of humanity. But in the mind of Atta, that wilful schizophrenia seems to have attained extraordinary proportions.

He cared deeply about people. It is not just that he cared about the Muslim poor. He even cared about the next American to rent his hire car. Brad Warrick, of Warrick's Rent-a-Car in Pompano Beach, Florida, said that Atta called him to say the car's oil light was on. When he returned it on 9 September, Atta reminded him about the light.

Unconsciously echoing the many Germans who experienced Atta's consideration, Warrick said: 'The only thing out of the ordinary was that he was nice enough to let me know that the car needed an oil change.'

Yet when that same man seized the controls of American Airlines Flight 11 two days later and aimed it at the World Trade Centre, he seems to have been able to dismiss from his mind the fact that the building, like the plane, was full of people he was about to send to a terrifying death: kind-hearted, middle-aged PAs such as Chrylla Wendt, dynamic young professionals like Volker Hauth and, in the World Trade Centre of all places, lots of challenging, emancipated women, just like Amal.

Born At Kafr el-Sheikh in Egypt's Nile Delta and brought up in Cairo. Father a lawyer

Education Studied architecture in Cairo and town planning in Hamburg. Trained as a pilot in Florida

Nowhere Man

By FOUAD AJAMI

Islam didn't produce Mohamed Atta. He was born of his country's struggle to reconcile modernity with tradition.

almost know Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian who may have been at the controls of the jet that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. I can almost make him out. I have known Egypt for nearly three decades, and so much of Atta's life falls neatly in place for me. I can make out the life of the 33-year-old man, one of a vast generation of younger Egyptians making their claims on a crowded land, picking their way through the cultural confusion that has settled upon the country in recent years.

Atta's father, a well-off but strict lawyer, has given foreign reporters fragments of the life. He has done it in an angry way, outraged as much by claims that his son is a hijacker as by the reports that his son may have been drinking vodka and playing video games days before he boarded American Airlines Flight 11. ''We keep our doors closed,'' the elder Atta said, ''and that is why my two daughters and my son are academically and morally excellent.''

The father was giving voice to the Egyptian bourgeoisie's discipline and anxieties, to its desire to keep its world and its norms intact. From the father still: ''He was so gentle. I used to tell him, 'Toughen up, boy.''' So much of the world of younger Egyptians is given away in that admonition.

There had come to Egypt great ruptures in the years when the younger Atta came into his own. A drab, austere society had suddenly been plunged into a more competitive, glamorized world in the 1970's and 1980's. The old pieties of Egypt were at war with new temptations. There must have been great yearning and repression in Mohamed Atta's life; it is the torment of Atta's generation. They were placed perilously close to modernity, but they could not partake of it.

The place affected an unaccustomed hipness -- big new hotels, the cultural clutter of Europe and America, the steady traffic of foreign tourists throwing in the air intimations of more emancipated ways in less constricted, repressed lands. But the sons and daughters were to be chaste, and the old prohibitions were to be asserted with increasing stridency.

An easy secularism had once been the way of Egypt, and a measure of banter between men and women. Never as tranquil as its legend, but a gentle and soft country all the same, Egypt knew a cultural wholeness and prided itself on a fairly vibrant cultural life. This had given way by the time young Atta, born in 1968, made his way to the university.

On the crowded campuses where Atta and his peers received an education -- an education that put off the moment of reckoning with a country that had little if any room for them, little if any hope -- there emerged an anxious, belligerent piety. Growing numbers of young women took to conservative Islamic dress -- at times the veil, more often the head cover. While the secularists sneered, it became a powerful trend, a fashion in its own right. It was a way of marking a zone of privacy, a declaration of moral limits. Young men picked up the faith as well, growing their beards long and finding their way into Islamist political movements and religious cells. A cultural war erupted in the land of Egypt. A stranger who knew the ways of this land could see the stresses of the place growing more acute by the day.

The sermons of the country -- religious and political, the words of those who monitored and dominated its cultural life -- insisted on a false harmony, held on to the image of the good, stable society that kept the troubles and the ''perversions'' of the world at bay. But the outwardly obedient sons and daughters were in the throes of a seething rebellion. In an earlier age, Egyptians had been known as a people who dreaded quitting their native soil. In more recent years, younger Egyptians gave up on the place, came to dream of fulfillment -- economic, personal, political -- in foreign lands. Mohamed Atta, who left for Germany in 1993, was part of that migration, of that rupturing of things on the banks of the Nile.

Religion came to Atta unexpectedly, in Hamburg, where he had gone for a graduate degree in urban planning. In bilad al kufr (the countries of unbelief), he needed the faith as consolation, and it was there that he sharpened it as a weapon of war. He styled himself emir, commander, of a religious cell. But the liberties, the temptations, still tugged at him; there were those reports from south Florida of drinking

and video games. Mohamed Atta carried the contradictions of his worlds, the new liberties and the medieval theology side by side. The man who willingly flew into a tower of glass and steel for the faith broke one of the canons of the faith.

The modern world unsettled Atta. He exalted the traditional, but it could no longer give him a home. He drifted in ''infidel'' lands but could never be fully at ease. He led an itinerant life. The magnetic power of the American imperium had fallen across his country. He arrived here with a presumption, and a claim. We had intruded into his world; he would shatter the peace of ours. The glamorized world couldn't be fully had; it might as well be humbled and taken down.

It must have been easy work for the recruiters who gave Atta a sense of mission, a way of doing penance for the liberties he had taken in the West, and the material means to live the plotter's life. A hybrid kind has been forged across that seam between the civilization of Islam and the more emancipated culture of the West. Behold the children, the issue, of this encounter as they flail about and rail against the world in no-man's-land.

Fouad Ajami, professor of Middle Eastern studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, is author, most recently, of ''The Dream Palace of the Arabs.''

There's more to militant Islam than Osama bin Laden.

Although most attention has focused on the Saudi dissident and his network, known as al-Qaeda, numerous groups in the Muslim world have used violence or terror in efforts to turn their countries into "Islamic states."

While bin Laden has ties to many of these groups, and some of them have ties to one another, experts caution that it's a mistake to view radical Islam as a monolithic movement directed by bin Laden or anyone else. "This is not a centralized Islamic network, ... more like a network of networks," said George Joffee, a Middle East specialist at the Center for International Studies at Cambridge University in England.

"Bin Laden's group serves as a clearinghouse of sorts, providing funds, training and logistical support to other Islamist groups," in countries such as Egypt, Algeria, Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines, Joffee said. "But it is a mistake to think that bin Laden controls everything."

Specialists say bin Laden cannot control these groups, which have independent structures and histories, and specific agendas against their home governments.

As investigators sort through the histories of those involved in Tuesday's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, they could encounter suspects with ties to one or several of these groups. Investigators also are likely to find suspects without ties to established groups, highlighting problems authorities have had in tracking the loosely confederated network of Islamic militants and developing evidence linking bin Laden to various terror plots.

European and Middle Eastern intelligence officials who have tracked Islamist groups say many operate separately from bin Laden's al-Qaeda, independently choosing targets and carrying out attacks. Some groups, especially in Egypt, have split into factions because of ideological differences.

"There are cells without leadership and without orders," said a former Egyptian intelligence officer who asked not to be named. "They get cut off from the wider networks, and they have to worry about their survival. That makes some of them even more extremist and unpredictable."

Many Islamist groups share ideological roots. These movements, which began to flourish in the 1970s, initially focused on overthrowing the secular regimes in their countries and replacing them with Islamic rule. Experts say bin Laden helped shift some groups toward fighting a broader war against the United States and the West.

"Bin Laden has been the source of ideological guidance," said Abdel Moneim Saeed, director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "He focused the Islamists' attention on the West, and political factors like America's strong support for Israel and for undemocratic Arab regimes."

Among the prominent Islamic militant groups:

Islamic Jihad and Gamaa Islamiya (Egypt): These Egyptian groups assassinated Egypt's President Anwar Sadat in 1981. At its peak, Gamaa Islamiya (Arabic for "the Islamic Group") had several thousand members, many of whom have been killed, imprisoned or forced into exile during a government crackdown. The group declared a cease-fire in March 1999.

With several hundred members, Islamic Jihad has been less active in daily attacks and has claimed responsibility for large operations such as a 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan.

The Egyptian groups are among the most important in bin Laden's network. In February 1998, bin Laden announced the formation of the World Islamic Front for Holy War Against Jews and Crusaders, a coalition that called on Muslims to attack American interests worldwide. Leaders of the Gamaa and Islamic Jihad were the two top signers (after bin Laden) of the announcement.

But the Egyptian groups have divided internally over their alliance with bin Laden, analysts said.

Members of the two groups complain that bin Laden dragged them into an unnecessary and damaging confrontation with the United States by including them in organizing the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. U.S. prosecutors indicted bin Laden in the bombings, as well as several leaders of the Egyptian groups who live with him in Afghanistan.

Those attacks ignited a crackdown in which dozens of the groups' activists - in Albania, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan and other countries - were arrested, sometimes with the involvement of U.S. intelligence, and extradited to Egypt.

"The Egyptian Islamist groups went through a crisis after the embassy bombings," said Diaa Rashwan, a senior researcher at the Al-Ahram center in Cairo. Leaders of the groups exiled in Europe or imprisoned in Egypt "felt that the leaders allied with bin Laden had abandoned the original fight against the Egyptian government. ... They started to take on the entire Western world, and some factions thought that was suicidal."

Harakat ul-Mujahideen (Pakistan/Kashmir): This Pakistani-backed group is mainly focused on fighting Indian troops in the disputed territory of Kashmir.

The group's leader, Farooq Kashmiri, signed the religious decree issued by bin Laden in February 1998 to announce the creation of his World Islamic Front. Intelligence officials say Harakat fighters are trained at bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.

Hezbollah (Lebanon): One of the largest Islamic groups in the region, Hezbollah waged a guerrilla war against Israel's 22-year occupation of south Lebanon until Israel withdrew in May 2000.

Hezbollah, whose members belong to the Shiite branch of Islam, has long been supported by Shiite-dominated Iran. Some Western officials have suggested that Hezbollah has ties to bin Laden, but many analysts doubt it because bin Laden, a member of Islam's Sunni branch, generally supports Sunni groups.

"Hezbollah has worked for many years to establish itself as a legitimate political force in Lebanon," said Muhammad Ali Khalidi, a sociology professor at the American University of Beirut. "I don't think Hezbollah would risk a confrontation with the U.S. that would surely lead to its demise."

Armed Islamic Group (Algeria): This group, known by its French initials, GIA, emerged in 1992 after the secular Algerian government voided elections in which an Islamist political party had won a decisive victory. These events set off a gruesome civil war between the Algerian government and Islamic militants. More than 100,000 have been killed, many of them slashed or hacked to death.

European intelligence officials have tracked the GIA since its creation, mainly because it is believed responsible for several terrorist attacks in France. U.S. officials focused on the GIA after the December 1999 arrest of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who tried to smuggle a car packed with explosives into the United States. Ressam pleaded guilty and said he had planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport as part of a plot to disrupt millennium celebrations.

Ressam testified that he was trained at a bin Laden camp in Afghanistan. Intelligence officials say Ressam had links to the GIA and was part of a network of cells in Europe and Canada that included Algerians and other North Africans.

The suggestion of a link between the GIA and bin Laden's network surprised some experts, because the GIA had been disavowed by other Islamist groups after it was implicated in a series of gruesome massacres in Algeria.

In 1997, the two major Egyptian groups and several groups based in Pakistan issued a statement condemning GIA's conduct as khawarij, or outside the bounds of Islam - one of the most serious charges that Islamist groups level against their opponents.

"The GIA's tactics were so gruesome that other Islamists wanted nothing to do with them," said Saeed of the Al-Ahram center. "That's why we were so surprised when European and American intelligence services began to link the GIA to bin Laden."

Others see GIA's involvement in bin Laden's network as a sign of his ability to bring together disparate, and sometime ideologically contentious, groups.

"Bin Laden can unite factions of opposing groups for at least the short term," said Mohammad Salah, a Cairo-based correspondent for the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat who covers the Islamist movements. "The groups can work together under bin Laden's umbrella, and then they can go their separate ways. They don't have to develop ideological ties."

The Suspects And Their Routes

A list of the 19 suspected hijackers who commandeered four commercial airliners in TuesdayÕs deadly attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

American Airlines flight 11

92 people aboard

United Airlines flight 175

65 people aboard

United Airlines flight 93

45 people Aboard

American Airlines flight 77

64 people aboard

Last tracked location of flight that eventually crashed into the Pentagon.

SOURCE: FlightExplorer.com

AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 11

Left Boston at 7:45 a.m. and crashed into One World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m.

--Mohamed Atta, 33, was born in the United Arab Emirates and is believed to be the cousin of suspected United Airlines Flight 175 hijacker Marwan Al-Shehhi. Atta lived in Venice, Coral Springs and Hollywood, Fla., and Hamburg,

Germany, investigators say.

--Wail Alshehri, 28, may have lived in Hollywood, Fla., and Newton, Mass.

--Waleed M. Alshehri, believed to have been 25, lived in Daytona Beach, Fla., and also may have lived in Hollywood, Fla., and Vienna, Va.

--Abdul Alomari, believed to have been 38, lived in Vero Beach, Fla., with his wife and four school-aged children. He paid $1,400 per month in rent.

--Satam Al Suqami, believed to have been 25. He is from the United Arab Emirates.

UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 93

Left Newark at 8:01 a.m. and crashed in Stony Creek Township, Pa., at 10:10 a.m.

--Ziad Jarrahi, No information

--Saeed Alghamdi, may have lived in Delray Beach, Fla.

--Ahmed Alhaznawi, believed to have been 20. He may have lived in Delray Beach, Fla.

--Ahmed Alnami, may have lived in Delray Beach, Fla.

AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 77

Left Washington, D.C., at 8:10 a.m. and crashed into the Pentagon at about 9:40 a.m.

--Hani Hanjour, may have lived in Phoenix, and San Diego.

--Khalid Al-Midhar, may have lived in San Diego and New York.

--Majed Moqed, No information released by FBI.

--Nawaq Alhamzi, may have lived in Fort Lee and Wayne, N.J., and San Diego.

--Salem Alhamzi, may have lived in Fort Lee and Wayne, N.J.

UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 175

Left Boston at 7:58 a.m. and crashed into Two World Trade Center at 9:05 a.m.

-- Marwan Al-Shehhi, 23, was born in the United Arab Emirates. He lived in Venice, Fla., and Nokomis, Fla.

-- Fayez Ahmed, may have lived in Delray Beach, Fla.

-- Ahmed Alghamdi, lived in Vienna, Va., and may have lived in Delray Beach, Fla.

-- Hamza Alghamdi, may have lived in Delray Beach, Fla.

-- Mohald Alshehri, may have lived in Delray Beach, Fla.

Excerpts from a five-page handwritten document that the FBI found in Mohamed Atta's luggage. Translated from Arabic:

• "In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate. . . . In the name of God, of myself and of my family . . . I pray to you God to forgive me from all my sins, to allow me to glorify you in every possible way."

• "Remember the battle of the prophet . . . against the infidels, as he went on building the Islamic state."

• "Remind yourself that in this night you will face many challenges. But you have to face them and understand it 100 percent."

• "Obey God, his messenger, and don't fight among yourself where you become weak, and stand fast, God will stand with those who stood fast."

• "You should engage in such things, you should pray, you should fast. You should ask God for guidance, you should ask God for help. . . . Continue to pray throughout this night. Continue to recite the Koran."

• "Purify your heart and clean it from all earthly matters. The time of fun and waste has gone. The time of judgment has arrived. Hence we need to utilize those few hours to ask God for forgiveness. You have to be convinced that those few hours that are left you in your life are very few. From there you will begin to live the happy life, the infinite paradise. Be optimistic. The prophet was always optimistic."

• "Always remember the verses that you would wish for death before you meet it if you only know what the reward after death will be."

• "Everybody hates death, fears death. But only those, the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, would be the ones who will be seeking death."

• "Remember the verse that if God supports you, no one will be able to defeat you."

• "Keep a very open mind, keep a very open heart of what you are to face. You will be entering paradise. You will be entering the happiest life, everlasting life. Keep in your mind that if you are plagued with a problem and how to get out of it. A believer is always plagued with problems. . . . You will never enter paradise if you have not had a major problem. But only those who stood fast through it are the ones who will overcome it."

• "Check all of your items – your bag, your clothes, knives, your will, your IDs, your passport, all your papers. Check your safety before you leave. . . . Make sure that nobody is following you. . . . Make sure that you are clean, your clothes are clean, including your shoes."

• "In the morning, try to pray the morning prayer with an open heart. Don't leave but when you have washed for the prayer. Continue to pray."

"Oh God, open all doors for me. Oh God who answers prayers and answers those who ask you, I am asking you for your help. I am asking you for forgiveness. I am asking you to lighten my way. I am asking you to lift the burden I feel."

• "God, I trust in you. God, I lay myself in your hands. I ask with the light of your faith that has lit the whole world and lightened all darkness on this earth, to guide me until you approve of me. And once you do, that's my ultimate goal."

• "There is no God but God. There is no God who is the God of the highest throne, there is no God but God, the God of all earth and skies. There is no God but God, I being a sinner. We are of God, and to God we return."

Written instructions link hijackers on 3 flights

'You are carrying out an action that God loves'

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Investigators have recovered three copies of the same letter belonging to suspected terrorists aboard three of the four airplanes hijacked during the September 11 attacks against the United States, Attorney General John Ashcroft said Friday.

"These three documents, this letter, is clear evidence linking the hijackers on the three separate flights on September 11," said Ashcroft, who added that the letters provided instructions to be followed before and during the attacks as well as Islamic prayers.

"It is a disturbing and shocking view into the mindset of these terrorists," the attorney general said at a Justice Department briefing.

The four-page letter, handwritten in Arabic, orders the suspected hijackers to bring "knives, your will, your IDs" onto the planes for battle and tells them they are about to "begin to live the happy life, the infinite paradise."

"Purify your heart and clean it from all earthly matters. The time of fun and waste has gone. The time of judgment has arrived," the letter says. "Keep a very open mind, keep a very open heart of what you are to face. You will be entering paradise. You will be entering the happiest life, everlasting life."

The letter goes on to say the hijackers must "know the plan very well in all its aspects. You should expect the reaction and resistance of the ENEMY."

"Train yourself, explain to yourself, convince yourself and urge yourself to carry out the mission," it says. "Check your safety before you depart, make sure you are not being followed."

Suspects left copies behind

One of the copies was found inside a suitcase belonging to Mohamed Atta, who investigators said was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the first airplane to crash into the World Trade Center. Atta's suitcase did not make it aboard the doomed jetliner and was recovered by FBI investigators in Boston, Massachusetts, Ashcroft said.

Another was found at Dulles International Airport near Washington, in a vehicle belonging to Nawaf Alhazmi, one of the suspected hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.

The third was discovered in the wreckage of United Airlines Flight 93. That jet crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania after what investigators believe may have been an attack on the hijackers by the passengers on board the plane.

"Let me make clear that, while this letter contains a number of religious references, I do not believe it to be representative of Muslims or the Islamic faith," Ashcroft noted. "The letter is a stark reminder of how these hijackers grossly perverted the Islamic faith to justify their terrorist acts."

The letter tells the hijackers to remember the battle of the "prophet against the infidels."

When the hijackers entered the planes, they were implored to say, "Oh God, open all doors for me. Oh God who answers prayers and answers those who ask you, I am asking you for your help. ... There is no God, but God."

It adds, "When the plane moves and it's on its way ... and you come to the moment of close combat, then strike like heroes who do not want to come back to Earth, say ALLAHU AKBAR (God is great), because you will instill terror in the infidel."

'Pray and wash before you leave'

The letter also details to the men how they should handle their last night on Earth.

"Remind yourself that in this night you will face many challenges. But you have to face them and understand it 100 percent," it said.

"When you have washed for prayer, angels will ask God to forgive you and angels will pray for you," it says. "You should not appear confused and nervous but joyful, happy, relaxed, tranquil, because you are carrying out an action that God loves."

Articles offering information on the terrorists.

1.http://www.newswatchone.com/nw1_trackingterror.asp

2.http://www.americanfreedomnews.com/archives/news_archives/news_pages/09_sept_01/news_arc_09x24x01.htm

Osama Bin Laden Created by the US