Word: atta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...essential story of Sept. 11 is straightforward. A group of 19 men spent months in the U.S. preparing for the hijackings. The cell had earlier been headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, where its alleged ringleader, an Egyptian named Mohamed Atta, 33, had lived off and on for eight years. Atta is thought to have piloted Flight 11, the first to make impact; two of the other suspected pilots, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah, were also residents of the Hamburg region. The Hamburg cell, in turn, is thought to have been an operating unit of a worldwide network of terrorists...
...left for Britain in 1992 and took a degree at London's South Bank University. Earlier this year, he enrolled in an Oklahoma flight school that had been visited by two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and German authorities say he had called the house in Hamburg used by Atta. In August, after suspicious behavior at another flight school in Minnesota, Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges. Today he is incarcerated in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, refusing to speak to investigators. Daoudi, who was picked up in the British town of Leicester, sits silent in a French jail...
...fire by strong civil-liberties groups, have been protective of the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. And while the European Union has demolished barriers to the movement of goods and people, its 15 nations have been slow to develop common institutions of criminal justice and investigation. For Atta and his cell of alleged conspirators in Hamburg, the characteristics of modern European life were a godsend. In addition to the hijackers known to have lived there, other men alleged to be part of the Hamburg cell have had arrest warrants issued for them: Said Bahaji, Zakariya Essabar and Ramzi Binalshibh...
Hamburg was an ideal long-term base; 1 in 7 of the city's population is foreign, as is 1 in 5 of the students at Atta's college. (Foreign students pay no tuition in Germany.) Atta and his friends could have stayed as long as they liked--Germany invented the perpetual student--since they had legal residence, could travel freely around the E.U. or leave it for a period, without arousing suspicion. It is hard to think of a way of life that so epitomized the promise of a borderless world and then perverted globalization to such an evil...
After seven weeks of investigations there is no hard evidence that links the Hamburg cell to any other. There are fragments of a puzzle--Atta made a 10-day trip to Spain from Miami in July that continues to bother investigators, while French sources still think that Moussaoui may be connected to the Hamburg cell--but many pieces are missing...