LOS ANGELES, 17 November — The Federal Bureau of Investigation has identified a man it believes was meant to be the 20th member of the Sept. 11 suicide hijacking team, and has intensified an international manhunt to track him down.
The man, a 29-year-old Yemeni called Ramsi Binalshibh, shared a house in Hamburg with Muhammad Atta, the alleged ringleader of the Sept. 11 plot, and has been wanted by prosecutors in Germany for some time.
Now US prosecutors believe he intended to be on United Airlines flight 93, the only one of the doomed planes with four rather than five hijackers on board, which ended up crashing into the Pennsylvania countryside.
Binalshibh tried to enter the United States three times over the summer but was denied entry each time, according to a report in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times. He had wired a down payment of $2,200 to attend a flight school in Florida alongside another of the named hijackers, Ziad Jarrah, but could not obtain a visa, apparently because of a suspected link to the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden harbor in October 2000.
He and two other terrorism suspects sought by German police, Said Bahaji and Zakariyah Essaabar, are believed to have left Hamburg shortly before Sept. 11. Their whereabouts are not known.
The FBI has assumed the existence of a "20th man" since the first week of the investigation. At first suspicion fell on Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Moroccan man arrested in Minnesota in August after raising suspicions at a local flight school. No evidence of links between Moussaoui and the known hijackers have emerged, however.
Binalshibh, also known as Ramzi Omar, was named by the FBI’s director, Robert Mueller, in a meeting with federal prosecutors on Wednesday. The LA Times learned about him from several of the participants. (The Independent)
