Amer Mohammed Kamfar was named in the media as one of the early suspects in the 9/11 attacks. ABC News had this dramatic account on September 12:
JEFFREY KOFMAN reporting:
Well Peter, what we know is that the investigations down here are happening in a number of locations. Here in Miami, across on the gulf side in Venice, Florida, and up north in Vero Beach, south of Daytona Beach. What we can tell you is on the scanners our affiliate--our colleagues at WPLG, the Miami affiliate, picked up a BOLO, which is a 'be on the lookout' alert to local police for a man named Amer Kamfar, also known as Amar Tieb Kamfar (ph). The description is a 41-year-old man, 5 feet 9 inches, black hair, brown eyes, stocky build. They give that he was driving a 1996 silver Plymouth Voyager but Peter listen to this--this is issued by the FBI Terrorism Task Force. They say use extreme caution, this man is armed with an AK-47. Now, what's not clear in this is whether the man was on the flight, presumably not, because they are looking for him. Now, we ran the tag on that plate. It took us to an address in Vero Beach. We then did a further search and not only did it take us to the one--to one address where his license plate is associated, but it took us to a second address. The same address that the FBI have been searching in Vero Beach all day. We also checked out his pilot status. And he is approved, he is a licensed pilot with an enormous number of qualifications, including flight engineer. Let me just turn to another point down here, you may remember...
JENNINGS: Just before you go on--go on from there, this man appears to have two names on this 'be on the lookout' thing from the FBI Terrorism Task Force, which you actually sent us, and he has got an--also a AKA, an also known as. Is--is this a man who, as of now, there's reason to believe was an associate of the hijackers or the terrorists? Or may have been on the plane? What do we know about this character?
KOFMAN: Well, I think it's fair to say that if there's a BOLO, a 'be on the lookout' alert being issued, that--that there may be--he may well be a live. Presumably if they were sure that he were dead they wouldn't be telling people to look out for him. This is issued by the Terrorism Task Force of the FBI. They're saying he is extremely dangerous, use extreme caution and they believe, as I've noted, that he may be carrying an AK-47.
JENNINGS: And you believe this was issued today.
KOFMAN: Well, we certainly heard it on the scanners today, that's correct.
Here's part of a New York Times report from September 13, 2001:
A piece in the Miami Herald, on September 13 2001, provided more specific details:
However, Kamfar and Bukhari were both officially cleared by the FBI in early October:
Press Journal (Vero Beach, FL)
October 6, 2001, Saturday
FBI CLEARS TWO EX-FLIGHT STUDENTS
The FBI says it has decided to officially clear two former students at Vero Beach's FlightSafety Academy of having any involvement in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
The FBI previously had kept an official silence about whether its agents were seeking or had even spoken with Saudi Arabian residents Adnan Bukhari and Amer Kamfar, both of whom lived in Vero Beach while attending the flight school.
Unofficially, however, it became well known that the FBI took Bukhari in for questioning and were searching for Kamfar shortly after the attacks.
Bukhari, 42, talked to the Press Journal last month about his experience. He said he was treated well by the agents and there was no way any of the Saudi Arabian students at the flight school were involved in the terrorist attack.
Both men and other students at the FlightSafety Academy had reportedly been cleared by the FBI a couple of weeks ago, but the FBI declined to confirm that information.
Some media reports had continued, however, to list the two men as possible suspects and FBI spokesperson Judy Orihuela said the agency wanted to clear the matter up.
"It's just that there was a lot of bad information out there," she said Friday from the Miami office of the FBI. "We never even confirmed that we were talking to anybody. Now I'm just saying they are clear and they're fine."
The men, who both work for Saudi Arabian Airlines, are back in Saudi Arabia.
Kamfar's name still appears regularly on 9/11 sites, though. The typical argument is that he appeared on the Flight 11 manifest, but turned out to still be alive, therefore he (and perhaps all the other hijackers) must have been using stolen identities. Here's WhatReallyHappened:
(We're focusing particularly on Kamfar being on the manifest here, but there's much more to the article - go read it if you want to see what else they had to offer.)
The argument has been taken up by many other 9/11 truth figures. Jay Kolar made similar claims in an essay printed in "The Hidden History of 9-11-2001", for instance, and these in turn have been referenced by David Ray Griffin.
Of course there's a very obvious problem with this chain of logic. They tend to simply assume Kamfar was on the manifest, when, as we've seen, the press stories immediately after the attacks show that was not the case. On the 12th of September ABC News reported a "be on the lookout" warning for a man perhaps armed with an AK-47, for example, strongly suggesting they believed he was alive. The next day the Miami Herald specifically listed him as a live suspect, separate from actual hijackers like Mohamed Atta. And on September 14th the Boston Herald printed the complete manifest, showing the passengers, the named hijackers, but not Kamfar, Bukhari or anyone else.
There is no reason to believe that the authorities thought Kamfar was on the Flight 11 manifest, then, and substantial evidence that they did not.
Why did they suspect him at all, then? The FBI have never provided an answer to that, but from the reports we've seen it appears the reasoning went somewhere like this.
The investigators decided early on that the pilots of the hijacked jets would never have flown them into buildings, therefore they were looking for hijackers with flight experience.
Records in Atta's luggage, along with public and airline records for the other hijackers would have pointed them in the direction of Florida.
Abdulaziz al-Omari appears on the Flight 11 manifest as Abdulrahman al-Omari (his full name was Abd al-Aziz Abd al-Rahman Muhammed al-Umari). If investigators searched public records for Abdulrahman al-Omari's in Florida then they would have found a pilot living in Vero Beach, and Kamfar is listed in reports as either a neighbour or roommate, who moved out just before the attacks:
So: Kamfar appeared to be connected to one of the hijacker suspects, and left suddenly only weeks before the attacks. It's not hard to see why the investigators would want to talk to him. But only a few days later the central mistake became clear:
There's no reason to believe Kamfar or Bukhari were on the Flight 11 manifests, then. And their cases provide no evidence whatsoever to support the idea that the hijackers were using false identities. They were just unlucky, caught up in a simple error made hours into the investigation which was corrected a few days later, and we see nothing more significant here than that.