Difference between revisions of "Mohamed Atta Background"

Posted on Sat, Sep. 11, 2004

From kind teacher to murderous zealot: Acquaintances saw hijacker transform

BY JOHN CREWDSON

Chicago Tribune

(KRT) - At 8:30 on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, police in Hamburg, Germany, learned via a faxed request for information from the FBI that their city had spawned the horror that for the past 17 hours had transfixed the world.

The German authorities quickly began a relentless search for anyone who might have played a role, however trivial, in the hijacking plot, or who might shed any light on the hijackers' motives.

Since then the Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA, the German equivalent of the FBI, has filled scores of 4-inch-thick black binders with dozens of such interviews.

Those interviews, translated by the Chicago Tribune, provide an exceptional and incongruous portrait of the key Sept. 11 hijackers and their leader, Mohamed Atta, who is remembered for laughing as he played with children and who called home to express concern about his father's health two days before delivering thousands of unsuspecting people to a horrifying death.

Three years later, the legacy of Sept. 11, 2001, extends far beyond the cavernous void where the towers of the World Trade Center once blocked the sun: a jittery nation on perpetual color-coded alert, an extra $200 billion for defense and homeland security, a still-sputtering economy, a ruptured Atlantic alliance, an Iraq war that otherwise would have been politically improbable.

As the twin towers disintegrated that bright, cloudless morning while terrified men and women leapt from windows or telephoned loved ones to say goodbye, the minds of most Americans were doubtless occupied by a single question:

How could those who commandeered and flew the planes have set out to murder thousands of innocent men, women and children in cold blood?

Easiest to explain are the 15 young Muslims, most from Saudi Arabia, who served as the "muscle" aboard the four hijacked aircraft: lost young men, mostly not well-educated, some with histories of drug and alcohol abuse, looking for something to lend meaning to their short lives while aspiring to an afterlife with the 70 houses and 70 virgins they believed are promised to Islamic martyrs.

More difficult, at first glance, are the former Hamburg university students at the center of the plot who piloted three of the four hijacked planes: Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, highly educated young men from affluent families who tossed away what appeared to be hopeful futures in a fiery microsecond.

From the BKA's interviews with those who knew the Sept. 11 pilots during their Hamburg years, an answer emerges that is at once more single-minded and far more chilling than most Americans might have imagined.

In attacking the World Trade Center, the hijackers were attacking not only America's values and freedom, as President Bush has suggested, or even a world-renowned monument to American accomplishment, or a vital node on the American economy.

Rather, they believed they were striking a blow at what Atta considered "the center of `world Jewry,' and the world of finance and commerce controlled by it," according to a former Atta follower named Shahid Nickels.

So paranoid had Atta become, Nickels told the BKA, that he believed Monica Lewinsky was "an agent sent by the Jews" to bring down the Clinton administration because it was too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

In their book "The Age of Sacred Terror," Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, who were counterterror experts in the Clinton White House, write that "What appears to be senseless violence actually made a great deal of sense to the terrorists and their sympathizers, for whom this mass killing was an act of redemption."

During most of the eight years he lived and studied in Hamburg, redemption would not have been out of character for the man then called Mohamed El-Amir. Atta, as he is known to history, was his grandfather's name, adopted only after he moved to Florida to take up flying, perhaps in hopes of obscuring his Hamburg connections.

The only son of a successful Cairo lawyer, the only brother of two sisters who are Cairo university professors, the first Mohamed Atta who emerges from the files of the BKA seems a logical, even-tempered young man, shy and polite but also generous, kind and even sensitive, a dutiful son who delighted in playing with children.

If anything set Atta apart during his early years in Hamburg, it was an intensity of devotion to Islam that seemed a bit beyond the norm in the northern port city's variegated Muslim community.

Doris Michaels, a Hamburg woman in whose home Atta stayed during his first months in Germany, remembered Atta putting his hands over his eyes and leaving the room when anything remotely explicit appeared on television.

But Michaels also recalled Atta saying "that for him, being a practicing Muslim, it was not easy to be 24 years old and unmarried and have no sexual relationship whatsoever."

Atta's aspirations during his early years in Hamburg were what might have been expected of a studious young Arab: to finish his studies in city planning and return home to begin a family and assist in the urban renewal of the Egyptian capital.

"He thought that his studies in Germany would enhance his profile in Cairo and would get him a better-paid job," Michaels said. "He wanted to marry and have children in Egypt as soon as possible."

Finding a wife is a preoccupation of most devout young Muslim men, for whom sex outside marriage is forbidden. But several who knew Atta thought he seemed uninterested in women.

Bechir Bejaoui, a Tunisian who met Atta in the library at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, also recalled Atta saying he intended to return to Egypt after graduation and marry.

But a young Muslim novitiate named Shahid Nickels thought that when Atta talked about marriage it was only "symbolically."

Heidi Jane Finke, a German woman who married a Muslim and converted to Islam, remembered being enlisted by her husband, Ayman Negm, another Egyptian student, to help find Atta a wife.

Finke told the BKA she knew of a possible candidate that she thought "would suit him well." But Atta, she said, was not interested.

Acquaintances remember Atta as reserved, not physically imposing, never aggressive. Nickels thought Atta "not too keen on sports," and the words used by others to describe him are mostly feminine ones: "Like a soft girl, kind and nice, very delicate, elegant," recalled Bejaoui.

Despite his comfortable origins, Atta was notorious for his frugality. And yet his bank and credit card records show repeated contributions to Islamic charities working in the Balkans, the mark of a devoted Muslim.

In what appears to be a more noteworthy act of generosity to someone he barely knew, in 1995 Atta loaned a Turkish baker, Muharrem Acar, some $25,000 to help Acar open a bakery.

Acar told the BKA that Atta didn't even ask for a promissory note when he made the loan. "I don't know why El-Amir had so much money," he said. "I did not want to know either. I heard later that his father was a lawyer. Maybe his family supplied him well."

In his day-to-day relations with those around him, Atta "had a quite normal way of behaving," in the opinion of Philip Kay, another Muslim convert. "He listened and gave his opinion. There were no emotional excesses or peaks."

But Kay and others eventually came to wonder whether Atta might be missing some essential human part.

Kay remembered seeing Atta laugh exactly once - when Atta played briefly with a child he met on the street with the youngster's mother. Doris Michaels recalled Atta laughing only when he played with her grandchild.

Ahmed Maglad, a Sudanese student in Hamburg who became close to Atta for a while, liked listening to music. According to Maglad, Atta thought that no music of any kind had a place in the life of a devout Muslim, and that the same went for good food and fun.

"He thought that the heart would die through fun," Maglad told the BKA. "He was convinced that there was not enough time in one's life to have fun. He said: `People die in Palestine, and you are laughing!' Or, when I bought delicious food, he said: `You are living your life like in paradise, and people are dying elsewhere.'"

When Maglad didn't change his ways, Atta took it as a personal rejection. "One evening he suddenly stopped me in a parking lot," Maglad told the BKA, "and asked me: `Ahmed, why don't you love me?'"

El-Amir, Arabic for "the teacher," seemed an appropriate name for someone who gave Islamic lessons each Sunday at the Turkish mosque near the railway station in downtown Hamburg.

It was during those classes that several acquaintances first noticed Atta's mounting interest in the political struggles of Muslims in the Middle East, North Africa, Indonesia and Chechnya.

Shahid Nickels, who attended many of the classes, recalled Atta as standing out from other Hamburg Muslims, not only for his superior knowledge of German and his advanced education but what Nickels perceived as "his high moral standards."

Julian Miklaszeski, the son of a Muslim father and a German mother who converted to Islam as a child, was in 6th grade when he enrolled in Atta's Sunday school at the Turkish mosque.

Miklaszeski soon became a protege of Atta's, and Julian's mother, Christine Marashdeh, had no hesitation in entrusting Atta with her son's Muslim education.

"His role in the Islamic community was the role of the model Muslim," she told the BKA. "For my husband it was important that the children would go and attend El-Amir's religious class."

Like Nickels, Miklaszeski remembers being surprised to discover that Atta's lessons ranged beyond the Koran to include the Muslim struggle, or jihad, in Palestine, Chechnya and Kosovo.

Despite his growing interest in the jihad, Atta professed non-violence. Michaels remembered a conversation in which Atta claimed "that he would not approve of violence to solve conflicts, and that there must be ways to convince people by other means."

Outside the mosque Atta distributed fliers supporting Muslim issues and causes. Friends said his special interest seemed to be how best to educate German Christians about Islam.

A Moroccan student, Lotfi Faik, recalls Atta as "a nice, friendly person, who would not have been able to hurt someone" and whose personal credo was "that you can change things by changing yourself."

Faik told the BKA that he saw Atta mostly over dinners at the apartment of Mounir El Motassadeq, a Moroccan student currently on trial in Hamburg on charges of assisting the hijackers in their preparations.

When politics came up, Faik said, "we spoke about the jihad, the Jews and America. You could hear statements which show a negative attitude with respect to U.S. and Israeli foreign policy. But extreme anti-American or anti-Jewish attitudes could not be seen."

Atta seemed tolerant of other faiths. "He did not automatically disrespect opinions of non-Muslims," agreed Kay. "Since he participated in the interreligious dialogue, I assumed that he was tolerant. At least, he did not call them `non-believers.' I would have remembered, because I don't like this term."

Mainstream Muslims do not see their religion as a thing apart from Judaism and Christianity, but as a historical extension of both those traditions.

The Koranic declaration that "there is no compulsion in religion" is interpreted by Princeton Islamic historian Bernard Lewis as a sign of forbearance toward other religions.

Elsewhere, the Koran recognizes Jews and Christians, along with Muslims, as "believers" in the same God, and counts Abraham and Jesus among God's prophets, although it does not recognize the Jews as God's chosen people or Jesus as the son of God. Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, is merely the last in a long line of divine messengers.

That is not how Islam was interpreted within the darker recesses of Hamburg's Islamic community, notably the ultraradical Al Quds mosque, where Atta was exposed to an imam named Mohammed al-Fazazi.

Al-Fazazi's venomous message included a Muslim obligation to slit the throats of "non-believers," Jews and Christians, and to take violent retribution against innocents, including women and children, for Israel's policies in Palestine, according to one of al-Fazazi's videotaped sermons.

Al-Fazazi, who departed Hamburg shortly after Sept. 11, has since been jailed in Morocco in connection with last year's car bombings in Casablanca that killed 45 people, including 12 bombers. He is also accused of links to one of the alleged perpetrators of the Madrid train bombings earlier this year.

The precise sources of Atta's religious transformation remain unclear. Some investigators speculate that Atta became radicalized during an unexplained absence from Hamburg in the fall of 1997. Although credit card records show that Atta was briefly in London and Cairo during that period, there is no evidence that he visited Afghanistan or had any contact with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida.

It was after returning to Hamburg in 1998 that Atta grew a full beard and abandoned his habitual slacks, shirts and sweaters for a turban and traditional Arab dress, called a dishdash.

Acquaintances report that he no longer rejected violence, and that his anti-Semitism began to assume extreme proportions.

Some of the Hamburg Muslims gathered around Atta were surprised when he began questioning, then rejecting, the tenets of mainstream Islam.

Julian Miklaszeski still remembers Atta's sudden declaration that all who did not follow Islam were non-believers. "All non-believers were evil in his eyes," Miklaszeski told the BKA. Shahid Nickels recalls Atta insisting that Israel had no right to exist and that suicide attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians were "legitimate."

Atta's small apartment on Marienstrasse in south Hamburg was filled with books and pamphlets about Islam, which he continually pressed on those around him. When Ayman Negm announced his intention to marry Heidi Finke, Atta deluged Negm with tracts against intermarriage.

Nor, it seems, did the new Atta brook much dissent from his acolytes. "He was very strong in his thinking," said a disillusioned Ahmed Maglad. "He wanted to be the boss. One had to do always what he wanted. He believed that what he did and thought was correct. His opinion had to be accepted."

Some, like Maglad and Kay, quickly became disaffected with Atta. Nickels also began to pull away, concluding that "Atta was simply much too strange."

As Nickels, Julian Miklaszeski and a few others departed that cloistered and toxic environment, the Hamburg cell contracted to include fewer than a dozen hard-core, and increasingly bitter, young Muslims.

One of Atta's Marienstrasse neighbors, Violetta Kryza, noticed that each day a half-dozen or more men, all with full beards, would arrive at Atta's apartment and stay for hours.

"Since our apartment is one floor above Atta's apartment and the walls in the building are very thin, we often heard loud Arabic prayers," Kryza told the BKA.

"Once, I got angry about the loud prayers. So I went to Atta's apartment at 1:30 a.m. in the morning, because I wanted to complain. Atta himself opened the door, but he stood in the doorframe, and I could not see what was going on inside. I complained, but Atta did not react at all. He just said something in Arabic."

Those who became infected with Atta's venom were a mixed lot: Marwan Al-Shehhi, studying in Germany on a scholarship from his native United Arab Emirates; Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni who had entered Germany by pretending to be a political refugee from Sudan; Said Bahaji, the German-born son of a Moroccan father and a German mother; and Ziad Jarrah, a fellow university student and the scion of a well-to-do Lebanese family.

Al-Shehhi would pilot the second plane to strike the World Trade Center, about 15 minutes behind the first plane, flown by Atta. Jarrah was at the controls of United Flight 93, which slammed into the earth nose-first in Pennsylvania. Binalshibh, who acted as liaison between the hijackers and al-Qaida, was arrested in Pakistan on the first anniversary of Sept. 11. Bahaji, who fled Hamburg days before Sept. 11, is believed to be hiding in Pakistan.

The personalities of those closest to Atta were once quite different. Al-Shehhi is described as "warm-hearted" and "emotional," someone who liked to joke and eat, Jarrah as a "playboy" who appreciated sports cars, fine dinners and his girlfriend, a dental student born in Germany of Turkish parents.

Binalshibh was "emotional" as well, but also cheerful, friendly and like Al-Shehhi a serious eater; Motassadeq more intensely focused and angry; Bahaji naive and introspective, with a passion for computers and Formula One racing.

"El-Amir protected him," Nickels said of Bahaji, "when he made exaggerated statements which sometimes made the others laugh at him."

Once they adopted Atta's vision of Islam as an exclusive, restrictive and vengeful religion, the group around Atta came to resemble what Nickels called "a certain kind of sect, where after a while you cease to be in touch with people who do not belong to your group anymore."

In the view of the independent commission that recently concluded an investigation of the circumstances surrounding Sept. 11, the hijackers were "highly educated zealots who could not find suitable places in their home societies or were driven from them."

While this may well be the case for the "muscle" hijackers, the evidence suggests that whatever alienation the Hamburg contingent felt was mostly self-imposed. Rather, for many of those who remained at Atta's side it seemed some personal crisis had created an emotional void that Atta managed to fill.

In Al-Shehhi's case, it was an inability to buckle down to his studies in Germany, trouble deciding on a career and an arranged marriage to a woman back in the UAE with whom Al-Shehhi had spent only a single day and night.

For Jarrah, it was a persistent tension between his affection for his girlfriend, his family back in Lebanon and his comfortable life, and a nagging sense that something more important lay beyond the realm of earthly pleasure.

The source of Bahaji's suffering was a broken heart, the result of a harsh rejection by a German-Brazilian woman whose parents had ordered her to end her relationship with her half-Moroccan boyfriend and then spirited her off to a university in the United States.

With his charisma, his natural ability as a leader and his persuasive powers, Atta bound the group together with his increasingly virulent hatred for Israel.

In the late 1990s, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was mostly in a hopeful stasis. The Camp David talks had not yet failed, and the current intifada, in which suicide bombings are met with attacks by Israeli tanks and helicopters, had not yet begun.

Still, Ahmed Maglad recalled that the Palestinian conflict "was always a topic for Atta. He spoke out against the United States because it defends Israel. The Jews were his enemies, in particular because of Palestine."

Al-Qaida's obsession with Israel is nothing new. Following the 1993 truck bomb attack on the World Trade Center, the precursor to Sept. 11, the perpetrators' sole demand was that the United States cease all aid to Israel and break off diplomatic relations with that country.

Even Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, insisted after his capture in Pakistan last year that his animus toward the United States stemmed from his "violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel," according to the Sept. 11 commission.

Those around Atta quickly became no less hateful toward Israel, and Jews in general. Motassadeq is remembered by a roommate for referring to Hitler as a "good man." Binalshibh was captured on videotape at Bahaji's wedding ranting about a "Jewish world conspiracy," reading a Palestinian war poem and denouncing Jews as "a problem for all Muslims."

According to Nickels, Atta himself saw Lewinsky as "an agent sent by the Jews in order to topple Clinton. Because from a Jewish perspective, Clinton's Middle East policy was much too liberal and friendly with respect to the Palestinians."

Atta's increasingly paranoid thinking, Nickels told the BKA, began to remind him of "Nazi ideas, according to which the Jews were the group which planned to extinguish Islam and control the world."

"The Jews, he thought, controlled the world of finance and the media," Nickels said. "The Jews, according to his conviction, controlled several newspapers in Germany, and the Jews also kept leading positions in banks, politics and business.

"The Jews had planned Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya as well, in order to fight the spreading of Islam, he believed. With respect to Israel, he was convinced that the Jews wanted to establish a theocracy between the Nile and the Euphrates, in order to chase away the non-believers."

For all his malice toward Israel, when Atta persuaded Al-Shehhi, Jarrah and Binalshibh to join him in committing their lives to the Muslim jihad, they spoke not of murdering Israelis or Americans but of killing Russian soldiers in Chechnya.

In late autumn 1999, the four young men from Hamburg arrived in Afghanistan, in search of paramilitary training in bin Laden's al-Qaida camps and assistance in reaching Chechnya.

They were the answer to bin Laden's prayer.

The two al-Qaida operatives already dispatched to San Diego to organize the hijacking plot, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, had proved entirely ill-suited: unfamiliar with life in the West, unable to learn English and incapable of learning to fly.

The unexpected appearance of Atta and his followers, who possessed none of those shortcomings, solved bin Laden's problem in a single stroke.

Atta, then 31, stood out, not only as the oldest and most intelligent of the group and the most committed Muslim, but as a natural organizer, motivator and leader who could manage the complex arrangements necessary to put 19 hijackers aboard four airplanes without attracting attention from the authorities.

During his weeks in Kandahar, Atta had several private meetings with bin Laden, unheard of for a new arrival. By the time he returned to Hamburg, Atta had been entrusted with the full details of what would become the Sept. 11 plot, and commissioned to set it in motion.

When Atta, Al-Shehhi and Jarrah departed Hamburg for the United States in spring 2000, Atta gave different people different stories about where he was going and why.

To Philip Kay, Atta claimed he was moving to Malaysia to write a doctoral dissertation. Ayman Negm told his wife, Heidi Finke, that Atta had gone to Miami to write his thesis. "I believed that he was in the U.S.A.," Finke said. "That was credible. But I found it hard to believe that he would go to Malaysia."

Others were told that Atta had returned home to Cairo to marry, and thought no more about him. But when Ahmed Maglad heard that Atta had moved to the U.S., "I was surprised about the fact that he, an orthodox believer, a very sober Muslim, would move to a non-Muslim country to study."

Among many who had known Atta in Hamburg, the first reaction to the news that Mohamed El-Amir had headed the Sept. 11 plot was that there must be a case of mistaken identity.

"I can't believe that El-Amir could have done it," Bejaoui told the BKA a few weeks after Sept. 11. "He was always so kindhearted and compassionate. He feared Allah, and he knew that the Koran would not approve of such deeds, and that he would be punished at the Day of Judgment."

Nickels, who remembered a conversation with Atta some two years before, had a different reaction.

"I told him that the Muslims were, at present, militarily and economically too weak to fight nations like the U.S.A.," Nickels told the BKA.

According to Nickels, Atta disagreed.

"No, you can do something," Nickels quoted Atta as having said. "There are ways and means. The U.S.A. are not almighty."

---

(Research and translation assistance was provided by Lilian-Astrid Geese in Berlin.)

---

© 2004, Chicago Tribune.
http://web.archive.org/web/20041213231101/http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/nation/9639881.htm?1c