As it shut down formal operations on Saturday, the September 11 Commission released a pair of staff monograph reports that reveal tantalizing and important new nuggets about the 9/11 plot, including the possibility that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and another hijacker visited an INS office in Miami together in May 2001 with Adnan Shukrijumah, a trained pilot who today remains one of the most wanted al-Qaeda terrorists with a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head.
The commission also revealed new but ambiguous evidence of a financial connection between one of the hijackers and a Saudi national in San Diego, and declares that this is the only known instance of a hijacker potentially receiving a noteworthy sum of money from someone inside the U.S. Atta visited the INS in May 2001 looking for a visa extension for one of his companions, but ended up with the INS discovering Atta himself had improperly received an eight-month visa, until Sept. 8, 2001, that was then rolled back to July 9. INS personnel who dealt with the Atta group then could not identify one of the men with him. But the "Terrorist Travel" staff monograph released yesterday said that, based on other evidence, the commission believes that fellow hijacker Ziad Jarrah "may have been" with Atta.
More significant is that an INS officer who dealt with the group said she was "75 percent sure" that one of Atta's companions, "a great looking kid," as she described him, was Shukrijumah, based on the photos released along with his "wanted" notice after September 11. There is a particular alert for Shukrijumah along the U.S.'s southwest border, and officials in Mexico and Central America are on the lookout for him, especially after he was reportedly sighted earlier this year in a Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Internet café. |