A Student's Dreams or a Terrorist's Plot?

by Marcus Walker and James M. Dorsey
The Wall Street Journal
September 18, 2001

Late in 1999, the alleged hijacker Ziad Jarrah told a German friend he was breaking off his studies in Hamburg to fulfill his ambition of studying in America.

What he didn't tell his friends and family was that in America he was going to take flying lessons to realize a lifelong dream -- and possibly a murderous intention.

Clues to the double life of Mr. Jarrah, who may have piloted the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania last Tuesday, emerged Monday along with information that suggests the Hamburg terrorist cell to which he belonged was bigger than was previously known.

Hamburg's Technical University said seven of its present or former students were on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of suspected terrorists and accomplices. Those include the two men thought to have flown airliners into the World Trade Center, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, and their Hamburg flatmate Said Bahaji, whose family says he is in Pakistan.

Now, university officials say, four other men, including three still enrolled at the university as students of electrical engineering, are also suspected of indirect involvement in last week's terrorist attacks in the U.S. The university and German investigators have withheld their names and their known whereabouts. Mr. Bahaji, of German-Moroccan parentage, was present on campus as recently as Aug. 17, when he took an examination.

Mr. Jarrah, 26 years old, from Lebanon, the eighth suspect who spent time in Hamburg, studied aircraft construction at another school in the city, the School of Applied Sciences. He attended classes from late 1997 until late 1999, university officials say.

After that, he remained on the school's rolls but spent time in Bochum, where he had a Turkish girlfriend, Aysel Sengun. Ms. Sengun reported him missing shortly after the terrorist attacks last Tuesday, and was shaken to learn of his double life, people in contact with her say.

Mr. Jarrah renewed his enrollment at his Hamburg college every term until this summer, but no one can remember seeing him there since 1999, college officials said Monday. Because of Germany's relaxed rules on college students it is possible to enroll from outside Germany, college president Hans-Gerhard Husung said at a press conference. Nobody checked whether Mr. Jarrah was turning up for classes.

But two of Mr. Jarrah's closest friends at the school, Melih Demir and Michael Gotzmann, said they knew he had left Hamburg. They expressed their amazement yesterday that Mr. Jarrah could have participated in the hijacking of United Airlines flight 93. The Ziad Jarrah they knew was devout but also open-minded and good fun. "He was very European-minded and open to the world," said Mr. Gotzmann: "He was very open and talked about his personal problems. He thought America was great, and he wanted to continue his studies there."

But when Mr. Gotzmann last saw Mr. Jarrah in 1999, he couldn't persuade Mr. Jarrah to leave him an e-mail address or postal address in the U.S. It wasn't the only thing Mr. Jarrah hid from Mr. Gotzmann.

At Mr. Jarrah's family home in Lebanon, his father Samir Jarrah concedes there was much that he, too, may not have know about his son. For one thing, the elder Mr. Jarrah didn't know his son was taking pilot courses in Florida.

A pained expression crosses the father's face as he recalls that his son failed to attend his sister's wedding in Lebanon this July. "He said he had to take an exam and would lose six months if he did not do so," his father says.

Mr. Jarrah had actually been in Florida since April this year, renting an apartment in the front of a house at 1816 Harding St., in the town of Hollywood. He was barely noticed, neighbors and his landlady said, and stayed until mid-June. The house was next to a busy road in a transient neighborhood, and 1.5 miles from the apartment at 1818 Jackson St. where fellow former Hamburg residents Mr. Atta and Mr. Al-Shehhi stayed from early May to late June.

Mr. Jarrah then moved to 4641 Bougainvilla in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, a nearby town, with another hijacking suspect, Ahmed Al-Haznawi. They stayed only a few weeks. His whereabouts after that are unknown; no one recalls seeing him in Hamburg again.

In Florida, he presented a pilot's license valid for Europe only; it gives a Hamburg address, Hansastrasse 40, according to FAA data from a commercial database. The luxurious flats at that address don't tally with the modest room his fellow students remember him renting. It is unclear where Mr. Jarrah enrolled for flight training in Florida.

His German friends said they were unaware of any contact between Mr. Jarrah and the other Hamburg-based suspects. Messrs. Demir and Gotzmann said they had visited Mr. Jarrah's flat several times. He lived alone, they said.

The elder Mr. Jarrah still hopes that the Ziad Jarrah who boarded United Airlines flight 93 may not have been his son. He can barely fight back his tears as he seeks to portray his son as a fun-loving, secular young man.

"Does this look like a family that produces terrorists?" he asks in a tear-choked voice, surrounded by his wife, two daughters and other relatives.

The family lives in a two-story, U-shaped family home next to the mosque on the potholed main street of a dusty predominantly Sunni Muslim town some 60 miles east of Beirut. The elder Mr. Jarrah paints the picture of a young man, a scion of a modern middle-class family, willing to go to great lengths to fulfill a dream.

"Ziad wanted to become a pilot since he was five years old," his father says. "He didn't care whether he would be a civilian or a military pilot. He was crazy about airplanes. The only books he ever borrowed from the library were about airplanes. I stopped him from being a pilot. I only have one son and I was afraid that he would crash."

The elder Mr. Jarrah says his son was silent when told that he wouldn't be allowed to become a pilot.

That may well have been the moment the elder Mr. Jarrah lost his grip on his son's life. Mr. Jarrah graduated in 1996 from Hikmeh High School, a Christian educational facility adjacent to the wreck of Beirut's former Holiday Inn Hotel in a part of the city that witnessed some of the worst fighting in Lebanon's civil war. He then persuaded his father to allow him to study German in Germany.

A year later, Mr. Jarrah convinced his father to fund his studies in aircraft construction in Hamburg. His father, a civil servant who earns 32 million Lebanese pounds ($21,000) a year, said the family gave his son a $1,500 a month allowance.

Mr. Jarrah's student friends in Hamburg say they never saw him touch alcohol in the two years they knew him, and that he never went to parties with them. He was a devout Muslim who prayed five times a day, according to Mr. Gotzmann, who added: "He was deeply Islamic but never extreme in a way that would have disturbed us."

Mr. Jarrah's uncle, Jamal Jarrah, seeks to prove that his nephew was not an Islamist militant by claiming that he visited nightclubs and enjoyed alcohol -- a widely repeated claim. But the father, like his Hamburg friends, says he was unaware of his son being a drinker.

His Hamburg friends said Mr. Jarrah never expressed any radical political views. He talked of the political situation in Lebanon, said Mr. Demir, but said that war was giving way to peace. Mr. Gotzmann recalled Mr. Jarrah getting "very angry" once, when Mr. Jarrah told him how the Israeli army had blocked off the water supply to his Lebanese town for several days. But he never expressed any enmity toward the U.S., both friends said. Their impression was the contrary: "He loved America," Mr. Gotzmann said.

The elder Mr. Jarrah laughs at suggestions that his son may have last year spent time in Afghanistan, as some media reports have suggested. But he turns stone-faced when asked whether his refusal to allow his son to become a pilot and earn part of his own keep may have cast a shadow over their relationship.

"We were friends, we were very close," he says, recalling that Mr. Jarrah returned to Lebanon in February to be at his side during a heart operation he had. He says his son phoned early this month asking him urgently for $2,000. "I didn't ask any questions," Mr. Jarrah says.

Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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