by Allan P. Dun­can

Part 3: Anoth­er Mohamed El Amir, AKA Mohamed Atta

In Part 2 of this series you had a chance to meet Dr. Magdy Elamir and his broth­er Mohamed El Amir. Accord­ing to an intel­li­gence doc­u­ment that Con­gress­man Ben Gilman had been giv­en in 1998 and a copy of which Date­line NBC also had a chance to review, both of the broth­ers had ties to Osama Bin Laden. (2)

Nei­ther Magdy, nor his broth­er Mohamed, were ever arrest­ed by US author­i­ties even though Magdy alleged­ly fun­neled mil­lions of dol­lars from a fraud­u­lent HMO to fund “ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties”, and Mohamed tried to get false papers to cov­er up a shipload of weapons dur­ing Oper­a­tion Dia­mond­back.

I had already done a lot of research on Dr. Magdy Elamir but didn’t know a lot about his broth­er so I start­ed search­ing the inter­net for ref­er­ences to Mohamed El Amir and was lead to of all people…Mohamed Atta!

I dis­cov­ered that while Mohamed Atta was a stu­dent at Cairo Uni­ver­si­ty , and also while he was liv­ing in Ham­burg , he was known to his close friends and asso­ciates as Mohamed El Amir.

ABC in Syd­ney , Aus­tralia pro­duced a doc­u­men­tary on 9–11 titled A Mis­sion to Die For, and reporter Liz Jack­son inter­viewed Mohamed Mokhtar El Rafei, one of Atta’s class­mates at Cairo Uni­ver­si­ty in the 90’s:

““Can you tell us your reac­tion when you first read in the news­pa­per, or saw the pho­to­graph that said the Mohamed that you knew was sup­posed to be the man who flew the first plane into the World Trade Cen­tre?”

“Well, for the first time I saw his pic­ture in the news­pa­per, and I read his name, I had a doubt that the Mohamed what I know, because I knew him as Mohamed El-Amir, and for the first time, I said oh, no, no, this is Mohamed Atta. He’s not Mohamed El-Amir, but… this is com­plete­ly close to his face. But for my feel­ings, I refused … from my inner believes that this is not Mohamed El-Amir. Of course, he is some­one sim­i­lar to him. And after­wards… when the news­pa­per that Mohamed El-Amir is called Mohamed Atta in Amer­i­ca , I was con­fused real­ly, because this is not Mohamed El-Amir what I knew, while we were in the fac­ul­ty.””

Fur­ther on:

“If I go back 10 years ago, while we were in the fac­ul­ty of engi­neer­ing — by the way, Mohamed El-Amir was close to my bench num­ber, because his name is Mohamed, the same as me — and we joined togeth­er in so many occa­sions to do some­thing.”” (20)

In a Tele­graph arti­cle by Han­nah Cleaver, pub­lished on Sep­tem­ber 17, 2001 , I also ran across ref­er­ences to Atta as Mohamed El Amir. Here are some excerpts:

“MOHAMED ATTA had plans for the future. If he had been schem­ing for years to kill him­self and thou­sands of oth­ers in an act of ter­ror­ism, he did noth­ing to betray that inten­tion dur­ing his eight-year stay in Ger­many .

The 33-year-old, who used a dif­fer­ent part of his name, El Amir, while in Ham­burg, said he want­ed to work for char­i­ty to improve the poor areas of Cairo, the city he told friends in Ger­many that was his birth­place and his home, where his fam­i­ly still lived, and where he trained as an archi­tect.

Prof Diettmar Machule said: “Mohamed El Amir was some­one who was in no way extreme. He was help­ful, upstand­ing and cor­rect, hard-work­ing, intel­lec­tu­al and devout in his belief. That is some­thing you would notice. But it was not an extreme kind of belief.

“The man in the pho­to­graph is the Mohamed El Amir that I knew, but I can­not believe that he would do such a ter­ri­ble thing,” said the friend, a Protes­tant Ger­man.

He added that El Amir seemed to lead a deeply devout and earnest but oth­er­wise unre­mark­able life dur­ing his time in Ham­burg .

Mar­wan Al She­hhi, 23, from the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, the man thought to have steered the sec­ond jet into the World Trade Cen­tre, was reg­is­tered at the same uni­ver­si­ty and shared El Amir’s flat.

But, while El Amir was well-known on cam­pus and was devot­ed to his stud­ies, Al She­hhi rarely turned up for lec­tures or sem­i­nars. “It seems he was a phan­tom stu­dent,” a col­lege spokesman said.” (21)

In anoth­er sto­ry that ran on CTV News, Lor­raine Pass­chi­er also refers to the El Amir sur­name and also names Atta’s father:

“Through­out his stay in Ham­burg , Atta used his fam­i­ly sur­name of El Amir, one of eight names author­i­ties have traced to him. But as he trav­eled across the Unit­ed States and t
o Europe over the past year, it appears he stuck with the name Atta as he put his sui­cide mis­sion in motion.

His father, Cairo lawyer Mohammed El Amir, told a news con­fer­ence that his son was inno­cent fol­low­ing the sui­cide hijack­ings. He called the Unit­ed States the “root of ter­ror­ism” and blamed Israel for the Sep­tem­ber attacks.” (22)

In a Press Release from the FBI on Sep­tem­ber 27, 2001 , the name Moham­mad El Amir is list­ed as an alias of Atta’s.

“4) Mohamed Atta — Pos­si­ble Egypt­ian nation­al

-Date of birth used: Sep­tem­ber 1, 1968

-Pos­si­ble residence(s): Hol­ly­wood , Flori­da ; Coral Springs , Flori­da ; Ham­burg , Ger­many

-Believed to be a pilot

-Alias: Mehan Atta; Moham­mad El Amir; Muham­mad Atta; Mohamed El Sayed; Mohamed Elsayed; Muham­mad Muham­mad Al Amir Awag Al Sayyid Atta; Muham­mad Muham­mad Al-Amir Awad Al Sayad” (23)

So now we know that Mohamed Atta was known as Mohamed El Amir to his friends and asso­ciates in Cairo and Ham­burg and that his fathers name is also Mohamed El Amir. In addi­tion we find that his father is a lawyer in Cairo .

I don’t know any­thing about Egypt­ian names, so I’m not sure if the name El Amir is as com­mon as Smith or Jones in the US . I do find it very inter­est­ing that Atta shares the same sur­name as Dr. Magdy Elamir and the exact same name as Magdy’s broth­er Mohamed El Amir.

Date­line NBC revealed that Magdy’s broth­er, Mohamed El Amir was an engi­neer in Cairo , Egypt . We know that Mohamed Atta stud­ied engi­neer­ing at Cairo Uni­ver­si­ty . Is there a con­nec­tion? Are they relat­ed?

The jury’s still out on that one.