Posted on 11/19/2001 5:45:48 AM PST by veronica
Family question authenticity of tape recorded on flight The uncle of a Lebanese man suspected of hijacking a plane during the Sept. 11 attacks on the US has questioned the authenticity of a tape recorded aboard the plane, as well as a reported farewell letter to his nephew’s German girlfriend which was sent a day before the terror attack.
The comments follow the release of tape recordings from the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers apparently struggled for control of the jet with the hijackers.
The uncle of suspected hijacker, Ziad Jarrah, who US investigators say may have flown the plane before it crashed, told the Al-Hayat daily that a voice on the tape identified as Jarrah’s did not belong to his nephew. In an excerpt from the tape, one of the hijackers, thought to be Jarrah, tells the passengers there is a bomb aboard the plane and says it is returning to the airport.
“I am a million percent certain that’s not his voice,” the paper quoted Jamal Jarrah as saying. “The voice on that recording speaks English with a fluency Ziad didn’t have. His education was basically French.”
Meanwhile, German prosecutors said Saturday that a package had been found containing a lengthy letter from Jarrah to his girlfriend, telling her he would not return from the US.
The package was misaddressed, so it was returned to the US where authorities discovered it, said Frauke Scheuten, spokeswoman for the German federal prosecutors office.
“This letter has been fabricated in an attempt to find evidence against Ziad Jarrah,” Jamal Jarrah said in a telephone interview Sunday.
The suspect’s uncle said it was suspicious that the address on the package contained a mistake that resulted in it being sent back to the US, saying his nephew had known his girlfriend for five years and would not have made such a mistake.
Der Spiegel quoted the letter saying: “I have done what I had to do. You should be very proud, because it is an honor and in the end you will see that everyone will be happy.”
Jamal Jarrah has suggested his nephew was merely a passenger on the flight rather than one of the hijackers.
The mis-addressed letter is odd, yes, but not impossible when someone is doing something like this under great stress.
D
Funny. But seriously, even Atta's parents did not expect him to be sucked into the fundamentalists' recruiting cells that operate in Western countries such as Germany, England, the US . . . I don't know the story of this uncle, but young men such as his nephew are often sent to the west for secular educations by families which are NOT fundamentalists. The guys are then recruited/seduced during their stays abroad, because it is easier for this to happen in our free societies than in the Arab countries from which they come and which are trying NOT to be taken over by the likes of the Taliban . . . These relatives could be in shock, like we would be if our kid was recruited by an awful sect of some kind . . .
Maybe he spoke with fluency because he had practiced saying those words - over and over until he was able to speak those particular English words with fluency.
Asle had already reported Ziad missing, just as she had 18 months ago when he disappeared for up to five weeks. And what she told the Jarrah family over the telephone then gave them their first suspicion that something was terribly wrong with their only son.
For according to a family friend, Asle told the Jarrahs that her fiancée, who would visit her each weekend from his university in Hamburg, might have gone to Afghanistan. Jamal Jarrah confirmed to me that this is what Asle had feared. "But it turned out that he had been moving from his first university in Greifswald to his new courses in Hamburg and had not been in contact with Asle during that time.'' Five weeks to change universities? Without telling his fiancée? Jamal hinted at some problems between the couple at that time. But even so, would he not have told his girlfriend his whereabouts?
The details of Ziad's life are as simple - or so the family say - as his death is obscure. Three other men have been named as hijackers of Flight UA93 - Ahmed Alhaznawi, Ahmed Alnami and Saeed Alghamdi - and if two of them lived with Ziad in Germany, his guilt seemed even more certain when it was revealed that one of his fellow students was Mohamad Atta, the Egyptian-born pilot who crashed American Airlines flight AA11 into the World Trade Centre on Tuesday morning. "You cannot choose your fellow students," Jamal Jarrah said. "He wouldn't have known his fellow students before he turned up at the university.'' Or would he?
An excellent point! It seems likely that these hijackings were very carefully rehearsed. Atta, or whoever was in charge, must have made sure that all the hijacking crews had a meticulous plan that would prevent any screwups. The biggest problem with Flight 93 was that it left 45 minutes late, so the passengers who called home found out about the WTC and knew what was going to happen to them unless they did something, and they had time to formulate a plan and carry it out. Also, Jarrah and company could not have known that Flight 93's passengers included so many former athletes that would easily be able to overpower them.
The letter could have been mis-addressed because Jarrah was addressing it from memory, or writing it in English or German, with which he was not as familiar, and misplaced a number or misspelled a street name. Or, he could have left it for someone else to mail, along with the anthrax letters.
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