The 19 hijackers

The four pilots were Mohamed Atta (Egypt), Marwan al-Shehhi (UAE) and Ziad Jarrah (Lebanon), who had lived and studied in Hamburg, and Hani Hanjour (Saudi Arabia), who had learned to fly in the United States in the 1990s. Atta flew American 11, Shehhi United 175, Hanjour American 77 and Jarrah United 93. [1][2]

The other 13 were mostly young Saudis with little education, chosen for their willingness to die and their ability to get US visas. At the time Saudis were rarely interviewed for visas and did not have to fill in their applications fully. [4]

The FBI published their photographs on 27 September 2001, noting that “attempts to confirm the true identities of these individuals are still under way.” [3]

American 11, from Boston: Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Satam al-Suqami, Wail al-Shehri and Waleed al-Shehri. Atta and Omari had flown in from Portland, Maine, on a 6:00 a.m. flight. Atta was flagged by the airlines’ computer prescreening system, CAPPS, in Portland, and Suqami and the two Shehri brothers were flagged in Boston. [1]

United 175, also from Boston: Marwan al-Shehhi, Fayez Banihammad, Mohand al-Shehri, Ahmed al-Ghamdi and Hamza al-Ghamdi. None of them was flagged. [1]

American 77, from Washington Dulles: Hani Hanjour, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Salem al-Hazmi. Hanjour, Mihdhar and Moqed were flagged by CAPPS; the Hazmi brothers were picked for extra scrutiny by a ticket agent, because one had no photo identification and could not understand English. Mihdhar and Moqed set off the first metal detector, and Moqed the second, before being cleared with a hand wand. The checkpoint camera recorded them. [1]

United 93, from Newark: Ziad Jarrah, Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Nami and Ahmad al-Haznawi. Haznawi was flagged, and his checked bag was screened for explosives before being loaded. That makes four men on the last plane, not five. [1]

In 2001 being flagged by CAPPS meant only that a passenger’s checked bags were held or screened; it did not mean a closer search at the checkpoint. [1]

Commission staff found the hijackers got into the United States 33 of the 34 times they tried. [1] Several passports bore signs of fraud, and some visa applications were incomplete or contained false statements that consular officers did not catch. Two hijackers were stopped and questioned by immigration inspectors; one of them, Mohamed al-Kahtani, a Saudi whom bin Laden had picked for the operation, was refused entry. [2][3]

In March 2002 a flight school in Venice, Florida, received the paperwork approving Atta’s and Shehhi’s change to student status. The Justice Department’s inspector general found the delay was a routine backlog, which itself showed how little the system was watching. [4]

On 23 September 2001 the BBC reported that several men named on the FBI’s list, among them Waleed al-Shehri, Abdulaziz al-Omari and Saeed al-Ghamdi, were alive in Saudi Arabia or Morocco and protesting their innocence. [1] The story was widely repeated and is still quoted as proof the FBI’s list was false. Three days earlier, on 20 September, FBI Director Robert Mueller had said the identities of several hijackers were “still in question.” [6]

The FBI list was based on names on passenger manifests; the photographs came later. Common Arab names were shared by other men, and some early photographs were wrong. The FBI’s own release noted that identities were still being confirmed. [2] The Commission and the later trial record used the final 19, backed by seat assignments, airport video, phone calls from the planes naming seats, and identification of remains. [3][4]

In October 2006 the BBC’s Steve Herrmann wrote that the confusion arose from common Arabic names, that the BBC had changed the archive caption on Waleed al-Shehri, and that the FBI was confident it had identified all 19. [5]