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:
“Neither the wrath of Heaven nor the attacks of enemies
are as fatal as Pleasure alone when she infects the mind.”
—Silius Italicus (26–101)
“We are seeing an increasing level of attacks on the “selfishness” of women. There are allegations that all kinds of social ills, from runaway children to the neglected elderly, are due to the fact that women have left their “rightful” place in the home. Such arguments are simplistic and wrongheaded but women are especially vulnerable to the accusation that if society has problems, it’s because women aren’t nurturing enough.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)
“Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: “You can’t deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.””
—Cesare Pavese (1908–1950)