by Frank Davies, Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The 19 hijackers who attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, did nothing to trigger suspicion and contacted “no known terrorist sympathizers” while living in the United States, the FBI has concluded.
In a June report that was declassified yesterday, FBI director Robert Mueller said the hijackers “dressed and acted like Americans, shopping and eating at places like Wal-Mart and Pizza Hut.”
Three received speeding tickets in the weeks before the attacks, but “remained calm and aroused no suspicion.”
One of the hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi, even reported to Fairfax, Va., police in May 2001 that he was the victim of an attempted street robbery. He later declined to press charges.
The 15-page report by Mueller includes these findings:
• None of the 19 is known to have had a computer. They used publicly accessible Internet connections and 133 prepaid calling cards to make telephone calls from pay phones, cellphones and land lines.
• The hijackers opened 24 bank accounts at four U.S. banks. A United Arab Emirates man, Ali Abdul Aziz, wired $109,500 during a two-month period to two hijackers in a SunTrust account in Venice, Fla. No transaction triggered a “suspicious activity” report.
• Hani Hanjour was the first hijacker to enter the United States, in 1991, years before the plot was hatched. He returned to Saudi Arabia the next year and legally re-entered the United States in 1996.
• The four men who piloted the hijacked airliners completed their flight training by spring 2001. All four took surveillance flights from the Northeast to California between May and August 2001 to prepare for the hijackings, sitting in first-class seats near the cockpit.
• At least four hijackers returned money to a United Arab Emirates account in the days before the attacks.
• Khalid Almihdhar, spotted at a terrorist meeting in Malaysia in 1999, “may well have been” the organizer of the nonpilot hijackers, who were responsible for keeping passengers under control. Thirteen such hijackers entered the United States from April 23 to June 29, 2001.
“These 19 terrorists were not supermen using extraordinarily sophisticated techniques. They came armed with simple box cutters,” Mueller testified. “But they also came armed with sophisticated knowledge about how to plan these attacks abroad without discovery, how to finance their activities without alarm ... and how to exploit the vulnerabilities inherent in our free society.”
The public release of the report came as top CIA and FBI counterterrorism officials defended their agencies to lawmakers.