Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tarik Aziz, told the Los Angeles Times last week, "This meeting did not take place. It is a lie. We checked with him: 'Did you ever meeting somebody called Atta?'"Asked if Atta might have been using a different name, Aziz told the L.A. Times, "Even if such an incident had taken place, it doesn't mean anything. Any diplomat in any mission might meet people in a restaurant here or there and talk to them, which is meaningless. If that person turned out to be something else, that doesn't mean he had a connection with what that person did later."
Czechs confirm suspected hijacker met Iraqi
Suspected terrorist hijacker Mohammed Atta contacted an Iraqi agent to discuss a terror attack on the Radio Free Europe building in the Czech capital, Prague, Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman told CNN.
Czech PM: Atta considered Prague attack
Atta may have attempted to enter the Czech Republic in May 2000, a government source said, but was turned away at the Prague airport because he did not have a visa. According to a source in the Czech government, Atta then obtained a visa at the Czech consulate in Bonn and took a bus to the Czech Republic, entering on June 2, 2000. He flew to Newark, N.J., the next day to begin his U.S. preparations for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
There is no evidence, Gross said, that Atta met with any Iraqis during that June visit to Prague.
But "we can confirm now that during his next trip to the Czech Republic, he did have a contact with an officer of the Iraqi intelligence, Mr. Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani," said Gross, referring to this year's meeting with Al-Ani.
Czechs Confirm Key Hijacker's 'Contact' With Iraqi Agent in Prague
Gross said Atta - believed to have piloted one of the commercial jets that smashed into the World Trade Center - first entered the Czech Republic by bus from Germany on June 2, 2000, and flew to the United States from Prague the next day.
"We can confirm now that, during his next trip to the Czech Republic, he did have a contact with an officer of the Iraqi intelligence, Mr. Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani," Gross said.
Hijacker's trail leads through the Czech Republic
raq on Thursday refuted allegations of Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross that an Iraqi diplomat had once met with Mohammed Atta, a leading suspect of the September 11 terror attacks on the United States.
"Stanislav Gross knows well what he spoke to the press had absolutely nothing to do with the reality and it contradicted with his previous statements, including the statement to the French daily Le Monde on October 9, in which he said he could not confirm the meeting between Mohammed Atta and the Iraqi diplomat in Prague," an Iraqi Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
In a statement carried by the official Iraqi News Agency, the spokesman accused the Czech minister of serving Israel by trying to instigate the West to launch a war against the Arabs and Muslims.
Iraq Refutes Czech Statement on Diplomat's Contact With Terror Suspect
As more and more evidence of Iraqi complicity in the terror attacks in the US comes to light, officials in the Bush administration remain polarized into two camps. The first, headed by Secretary of State Colin Powell, has categorically rejected suggestions that Iraq may have played a role in the September 11 attacks. Powell and others have declined to name Iraq as a suspected sponsor of the attacks, ostensibly because sufficient evidence of its involvement has not come to light. In fact, it appears that fear of disrupting the Bush administration's anti-terrorism coalition is the primary concern at the State Department.
Mounting Evidence of Iraqi Link to Terror Attacks
Soviet propagandists used to touch up photographs to remove the face of a Kremlin official who had fallen from favor, making him a "nonperson."
The same disinformation technique is now being used to wipe out the fact of a meeting in Prague in April, 2001 — five months before the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. — between Mohamed Atta, the leading Qaeda hijacker, and Ahmed al-Ani, the Iraqi consul in Prague, who was Saddam Hussein's intelligence case officer there.
The question is, did Czech intelligence see Atta or not? It seems that they did. Undoubtedly al-Ani met with somebody. Does Czech intelligence have photographs that would show the likeness of this person, to see if it was Atta or not? (How Atta might have traveled to Prague and back may be unknown, but that is secondary.)
According to various articles, Czech intelligence officers saw Atta and al-Ani embrace at Ruzyne Airport, then go to the headquarters of Radio Free Europe. This was said to have occurred in early April, just weeks before al-Ani's 4/22/2001 expulsion from Czechoslovakia.
There are also reports that Atta met repeatedly with another Iraqi intelligence agent, Habib Faris Abdullah al-Mamouri, in Rome, Hamburg, and Prague. The Rome meeting was said to be shortly before al-Mamouri's July, 2001, disappearance. The meeting would have taken place in June or July, 2001, most likely July. This was probably a side trip Atta took while on a well-documented trip in July from the U.S. to Spain via Switzerland. (Atta is said to have met with known terrorists at the Catalan resort town Salou, in northeastern Spain, and he also tried to visit a prisoner at nearby Tarragona prison near the end of that trip.)