Tag: Aysel Senguen

4 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah (the pilots who flew the 9/11 planes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center and crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania) both fly internationally on the same day (but separately), Atta leaving the United States for the first time since he arrived in June 2000.

Though Khalid Sheikh Mohammed discouraged external travel except for operational purposes, the two were so confident of their operational security that they both left the country soon after receiving their commercial pilot’s licenses.

Atta had overstayed his tourist visa by one month. He flew from Tampa to Madrid, returning on January 10, again gaining entry into the U.S.

Jarrah was already in Lebanon visiting his family. He flew Olympic Airlines from Beirut to Athens; and then from Athens to Dusseldorf, Germany. There he was met by Aysel Senguen, his common law wife, and the two flew from Dusseldorf to Newark, New Jersey, continuing on to Tampa. Senguen, a German national, left the United States on January 15, returning to Germany.

29 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Unknown to U.S. intelligence, Ziad Jarrah (the hijacker pilot of United Airlines flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania) returns to the United States from a trip to Germany just two weeks after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. It was the first of five foreign trips he would take during his time in the United States.

It was the first or last time that Jarrah would depart from the United States to see his common law wife, Aysel Senguen. As the most westernized of the hijackers, and also married, Jarrah was relatively invisible to immigration and customs officials. The 9/11 Commission later reported that Jarrah “made hundreds of phone calls to her and communicated frequently by email” during his stay in the United States (911 Commission, p. 224) but because they were in German–and were mostly love letters and other communications dealing with the day-to-day lives of the two–U.S. intelligence never paid attention.

Jarrah flew from Atlanta, Georgia to Frankfurt, Germany on Delta Flight 20 on October 7, just five days before the Cole was attacked. Mohammed Atta (the plot’s emir in the U.S.) worried that given the terrorist attack, he might not be able to return, with intelligence vigilance and police measures being tightened. Jarrah and Aysel went to Paris for a late honeymoon while al Qaeda pondered whether it lost one of its valuable pilots.

Finally, on the 29th, Jarrah arrived back in the United States, flying from Dusseldorf, Germany (Condor Flight 7178) to Frankfurt and on to Tampa, Florida (Lufthansa Flight 223). On a tourist visa, he received a six-month length of stay in the United States. Immigration and customs asked nothing.