Mohand al-Shehri
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This photograph of Mohand al-Shehri was released by the FBI in the days following the attack. |
Mohand al-Shehri (
Arabic: مهند الشهري; also
transliterated Alshehri, and also known under the aliases
Mohammed Alshehhi and
Mohald Alshehri)
(July 5, 1979 - September 11, 2001) was named by the
FBI as one of the muscle hijackers aboard
United Airlines flight 175 in the
September 11, 2001 attacks, although
Saudi Arabia claims he is still alive and merely a victim of mistaken/stolen identity.
Born July 5th, 1979, Al-Shehri was one of five hijackers to come from the
'Asir province of
Saudi Arabia, the others being
Ahmed al-Nami,
Abdulaziz al-Omari and
Waleed and
Wail al-Shehri, two brothers unrelated to Mohand.
Mohand was a student at
Imam Muhammed Ibn Saud Islamic University in
Abha, but his growing devotion to
Wahhabiism took him on frequent trips to
Al Qasim, and as a result he failed his final exams.
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Visa Application |
According to
Arab News, al-Shehri went to fight in
Chechnya in early
2000, where he may have met
Hamza al-Ghamdi. On October 23rd, Mohand applied for a B-1/B-2 US visa in
Jeddah, other than an error on his school's address the application was not suspicious and he was not interviewed before being granted the Visa.
Hamza and Mohand flew together from
Iran into
Kuwait that October. Three months later the pair rented a
post office box in
Delray Beach, Florida, where someone with the same name signed up to use the public library's computers[
1]. According to FBI director
Robert Mueller and the
9/11 Commission however, al-Shehri did not first enter the
United States until a
London or
Dubai flight on
May 28 with Hamza and
Abdulaziz Al-Omari.
He was one of 9 hijackers to open a
SunTrust bank account with a cash deposit around June of 2001, and on July 2nd gains a Florida State ID Card.
Mohand occasionally trained on simulators at the
FlightSafety Aviation School in
Vero Beach, Florida together with
Abdulaziz Al-Omari and
Saeed Al-GhamdiFayez Banihammad purchased both his and Mohand's one-way first class tickets for
United Airlines Flight 175 online on August 27th or 29th, charging the $4464.50 to a
Visa card from
Mustafa al Hawsawi, listing their addresses both as a
Mailboxes Etc. in
Delray Beach. This was
not the same postal box used by
Hamza and
Ahmed al-Ghamdi who purchased their tickets for the same flight a day later with another Mailboxes Etc. postal box in Delray Beach, although both groups listed the same phone number.
On September 7th he flies from
Fort Lauderdale to
Newark, New Jersey with
Hamza al-Ghamdi on $139.75 tickets purchased from the
Mile High Travel agency in
Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.
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Al-Shehri in an undated photograph |
On
September 10,
2001, he was one of four hijackers (Marwan, Banihammad, Mohand, and al-Suqami) sharing a room at the
Milner Hotel in
Boston, Massachusetts, where one of them called around for prostitutes, but eventually nixed the idea, possibly based on finances.
The next morning, Banihammad drove al-Shehri in a rental car to
Logan International Airport, where they returned the car and boarded Flight 175. He sat adjacent to Banihammad. About a half an hour into the flight, the plane was hijacked and
Marwan al-Shehhi flew it into the south tower of the
World Trade Center as part of the coordinated attacks.
On
September 20, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince
Saud Al-Faisal stated: "It was proved that [al-Shehri] had nothing to do with what happened." The Saudi embassy said that al-Shehri is "not dead and had nothing to do with the heinous terror attacks in New York and Washington." However in February of 2002 Saudi Arabia acknowledged for the first time that 15 of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers were Saudi citizens. Interior Minister
Prince Nayef stated, "Previously, Saudi Arabia had said the citizenship of 15 of the 19 hijackers was in doubt despite U.S. insistence they were Saudis. Saudi leaders were shocked to learn 15 of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. "The names that we got confirmed that," Nayef said in an interview. "Their families have been notified."
*
The Final 9/11 Commission Report
