Volume 49, Number 1 · January 17, 2002
Manual for a 'Raid'
By Hassan Mneimneh, Kanan Makiya
Three handwritten copies of a five-page Arabic document were found by the FBI after the September 11 attack: one in a car used by the hijackers and left outside Dulles International Airport, one in a piece of Mohammad Atta's luggage that, by accident, did not get on the plane from Logan Airport, one in the wreckage of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. Only a part of this document—pages two through five—is publicly available; it was posted on the FBI Web site on September 28, 2001.[1] In view of the number of copies found, it is reasonable to assume that there were other copies in the luggage of the other hijackers. If so, it is unlikely that many of the hijackers did not know the suicidal nature of their mission, as some commentators have argued. Since one of the three copies was found in Mohammad Atta's luggage, it also seems unlikely that the hijackers were trying, by leaving copies of the documents behind, to mislead the investigators who would retrace their steps after the event.[2]
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