WASHINGTON, 22 January 2004 — A month before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, US Customs officials at an airport in Orlando, Florida, refused entry to a young Saudi man who authorities now suspect may have been arriving to meet Mohammed Atta, leader of the suicide hijacking plot, government sources said Tuesday.
The man, identified only as “Al Qahtani,” attempted to enter the United States in early August 2001, officials said, but was turned back by Customs officials, who grew suspicious when he said he planned to visit friends in this country but could not name them.
In the months after the strikes on New York and Washington, authorities discovered that Atta placed an overseas call from the Orlando airport at the time Al Qahtani was being detained there.
Al Qahtani was later taken prisoner in Pakistan or Afghanistan and is now being held at the US Naval prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba officials said.
Counterterrorism and law enforcement officials said he is one of several people — a half dozen or more, including plot mastermind Ramzi Binalshibh — who may have attempted to come to the United States to join the 19 men who undertook the hijack plot on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Authorities have long debated why one of the hijacked airliners, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers stormed the cockpit, had only four hijackers aboard, while the other three had five.
Al Qahtani has offered only minimal information to his interrogators and has not admitted to being part of the terror plot, one official said. His case is scheduled to be highlighted Monday during a hearing of the independent commission investigating the attacks. The border inspector who rejected Al Qahtani, Jose Melendez-Perez, is scheduled to testify.
Details of the incident were first revealed in this week’s issue of Newsweek magazine.
While Al Qahtani was confined at Guantanamo Bay, his fingerprints were run through federal databases. A hit revealed his attempt to enter the United States through Orlando in the first week of August 2001, according to law enforcement officials.
FBI investigators noted evidence that Atta was in Orlando around the same time, one official said. Through phone logs, credit card statements and other records, investigators confirmed that Atta was at the Orlando airport when Al Qahtani was supposed to arrive and that he made an international call while there, the official said. However, there is no surveillance video of Atta at the airport, one official said.
There are at least two Saudi men held at Guantanamo Bay named Al Qahtani: Jabir Hasan Al Qahtani and Abdullah Hamid Al Muslih Al Qahtani. The families of both men insist that their sons were working for a relief organization and were wrongly detained.
Al Qahtani arrived in the United States about a week before Zaccarias Moussaoui’s Aug. 16 arrest in Minnesota on immigration charges. Al-Qaeda detainees have told government interrogators that Moussaoui, who faces federal charges of conspiring with Al-Qaeda, was not a “designated participant” in the Sept. 11, 2001 plot but was to participate in a second wave of attacks.
