Attacks
On September 10, 2001, Suqami shared a room at the Milner Hotel in Boston with three of the Flight 175 hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi, Fayez Banihammad, and Mohand al-Shehri.
On the day of the attacks, Suqami checked in at the flight desk using his Saudi passport, and boarded American Airlines Flight 11. At Logan International Airport, he was selected by CAPPS, which required his checked bags to undergo extra screening for explosives and involved no extra screening at the passenger security checkpoint.
An FAA memo, circulated in February 2002, claimed that Suqami shot passenger Daniel M. Lewin (Seat 9B), co-founder of Akamai Technologies and a former member of the Israeli Sayeret Matkal, for attempting to foil the hijacking. While based on the frantic phonecall received from a stewardess of the flight, the report has been a matter of some controversy, since both the FAA and FBI have strongly denied the presence of firearms smuggled aboard. It is now believed that Suqami stabbed Lewin as he attempted to intervene in the hijacking
Suqami's passport was found by a passerby, reportedly in the vicinity of Vesey Street, before the towers collapsed. (This was mistakenly reported by many news outlets to be Mohamed Atta's passport.) A columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian expressed incredulity about the authenticity of this report, questioning whether a paper passport could survive the inferno unsinged when the plane's black boxes were never found. According to testimony before the 9/11 Commission by lead counsel Susan Ginsburg, his passport had been "manipulated in a fraudulent manner in ways that have been associated with al Qaeda." Passports belonging to Ziad Jarrah and Saeed al-Ghamdi were found at the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 as well as an airphone.
Read more about this topic: Satam Al-Suqami
Famous quotes containing the word attacks:
“We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilisation.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. Once and again one of those great influences which we call a Cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward.... The attacks they sustain are more cruel than the collision of arms.... Friends desert and despise them.... They stand alone and oftentimes are made bitter by their isolation.... They are doing nothing less than defy public opinion, and shall they convert it by blows. Yes.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)