Saudi citizen Hani Hanjour, who would go on to pilot the plane that attacked the Pentagon, departs the United States for Saudi Arabia. He had been living in Scottsdale, Arizona and attending flight training, where he was hoping to become a commercial airline pilot.
Hanjour was the only one of the four 9/11 hijackers who had been to the United States prior to June 2000. He lived in the U.S. in October 1991 and enrolled in English language school in Tucson. He then returned in 1996, arriving in New York on April 2, living for a month in Florida before moving to Oakland, California, where he attended English language school at the ELS Language Center at Holy Names College (3510 Mountain Boulevard in Oakland, CA) from May until August 1996.
Though the 9/11 plot didn’t begin until much later—and Hanjour was the last of the pilots to join the group—his earlier residence and travel in the United States (and his attending flight school) never attracted the attention of any authorities or the intelligence community, such was the blind trust given over to Saudi citizens.