[Nogbad]

Has anyone done a handwriting (or rather printing) comparison
between the hijackers (Atta especially)
and the mailed letters and envelopes?

I have heard NOTHING about such a comparison.
But obviously it has been done.

I seem to recall there were some photographs of Atta's diaries.
Does anyone have them or a link to them?

[Clinton's a rapist]

I'm not aware of any published photographs of Atta's diary. I agree that he is the person most likely to have written the anthrax letters. The business with him seeking treatment for reddened hands would support that hypothesis.

[Alamo-Girl]

I agree the FBI has probably done this, but I haven't seen the Atta diaries at all...

[Mitchell]

I've seen photos of the statements (diaries?) he left behind. They're in Arabic, on lined paper. I'll see if I can find the link. Everything was in the Arabic alphabet.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I seem to recall there were some photographs of Atta's diaries.
Does anyone have them or a link to them?

Were they written in English?

[Mitchell]

I found it, at the FBI web site -- here's a link to the Arabic writings that three of the hijackers left behind.

However, it turns out that this is probably not a sample of Atta's handwriting. First of all, there were 3 of these documents; according to a newspaper article, these 3 were similar but not identical; I don't know which of these 3 is pictured in the FBI page above -- it doesn't seem to say (the FBI page implies that the 3 are identical).

The newspaper article also gives an analysis of one of the writings (Alhazmi's). What the article says is quite surprising -- I'll find it and post it also. Supposedly these writings were dictated to a woman by either a non-native speaker of Arabic or an uneducated Arab. They're said to be confused in nature, not exactly suicide notes or instructions for terrorists; it's not clear what they are.

[Mitchell]

I found a sample of Marwan Alshehhi's handwriting. He was one of the 9/11 terrorists, a cousin of Mohammed Atta. The two shared a Florida apartment and took flying lessons together.

The sample is a hotel registration card that Alshehhi filled out:

I found this on a handwriting analysis site. It looks real, but I don't know the original source. (The site appears to be honest. They also have copies of the so-called terrorist suicide notes that we've discussed; I verified that the images they post are identical to the images at the FBI web site.)

The most important thing to notice is that Alshehhi wrote the dates as: "8-26 - 9-2-01". Notice the American date order (month-day-year). This goes against some people's claim that the American ordering of the dates in the anthrax letters suggests that the anthax letters were written by an American, not a Middle Easterner. This hotel registration card confirms that the 9/11 terrorists were sufficiently familiar with our customs that they would write dates in the order we normally use. [Just to jog everyone's memory, the anthrax letters are all dated "09-11-01".]

The second thing to notice is the use of dashes in the dates, instead of the more common slashes. Dashes were also used in the dates in the anthrax letters.

A difference between the dates here and the dates in the anthrax letters is that the month on the anthrax letters is written as "09", while the months on this registration card are written without the initial "0".

I'm no handwriting expert, but this doesn't appear to be the same hand as the anthrax letters. Of course, the writer of the anthrax letters was apparently trying to disguise his handwriting. He printed, and the writing is very neat and deliberate. This sample is written in cursive, and it was scrawled quickly, so they're difficult to compare.

I won't bother reposting the anthrax letter or envelopes, since I don't see a lot of similarity in handwriting between those documents and this sample. The 6 and the 9 look similar, but the 1, 2, and 8 do not. There's no slant in the hotel card sample. If you do want to compare them yourself, you'll probably find it useful to get a graphics program and enlarge the images.