Terror Suspects Were Different
AL-MARJ, Lebanon (AP) - They were so different.
Ziad Jarrah, a pampered only son, loved women and booze. Marwan Al-Shehhi was said to be the victim of a bullying half brother who forced him into a marriage that lasted only two weeks and made him go to Germany to study aviation.
U.S. and German investigators suspect both men of being part of a group formed in the German city of Hamburg this year in order to destroy U.S. targets. The group also allegedly included Mohammed Atta, a relative of Al-Shehhi.
In Switzerland, the SonntagsBlick newspaper said Atta and Al-Shehhi, accused of seizing the planes that smashed into the World Trade Center, spent time in Switzerland during the summer and stayed in a Zurich hotel. It said they bought the pocket knives and box cutters used to commandeer the four jetliners Tuesday.
In the United States, two people were in custody - one who was arrested in New York and one who was detained at Toronto's Pearson International Airport and handed over to the FBI at the U.S. border. A third man was being detained as a possible material witness, U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said Sunday. Twenty-five people were held on possible immigration violations while investigators determine whether they were involved.
In the spacious yard of the home of Jarrah clan, middle-aged men sat somberly Sunday on plastic chairs under the grapevines in this prosperous village in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon.
The hush was that of a wake, but it was no wake. The village's sheik had decreed that any display of mourning was inappropriate without evidence that Jarrah was indeed dead.
The family, the town's most prominent Sunni Muslim clan, is stunned that anyone could believe that their slim, bespectacled son, who turned 26 in May, could have boarded United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco on the suicide mission that crashed in Pennsylvania.
U.S. reports said that one of the men who helped commandeer one of the planes was named Ziad Jarrahi and that U.S. aviation authorities listed a Ziad Jarrah as holding a pilot's license. The difference in spellings could be a result of differing English transliterations of the same Arabic name.
``If he had been on the plane, then he would have gone down as a victim, like the other passengers, and his family deserves compassion and condolences,'' Jarrah's uncle, Jamal, said.
Ziad Jarrah had a modern upbringing that included an education at Christian schools, his uncle said. His two sisters go to the beach and wear sleeveless dresses - choices Jarrah never tried to change. His father is a civil servant, his mother a teacher. Like many Lebanese parents, they sent their only son abroad for an education.
According to Jamal Jarrah, his nephew rarely went to the mosque for Friday prayers and was indifferent to politics.
He pulled out a picture taken last year at a family wedding showing his nephew dancing in a light, open-necked shirt and a dark jacket, a stylish, light beard shadowing his cheeks.
``Does that look like a person who would carry out a bombing?'' Jamal said.
Questions nag, though:
Why did Jarrah ask his family to urgently wire him $2,000 earlier this month on top of his monthly stipend of $2,000?
Last year, Jarrah's Turkish girlfriend in Germany called his family to say he had been missing for weeks. Had he gone to Afghanistan, as some reports suggested?
What about the suitcase that German investigators said they found in the apartment of Jarrah's girlfriend? They contained ``airplane-related documents,'' investigators said.
Last year, Jarrah left Hamburg, where he was specializing in flight engineering, to take aviation courses in Florida. Around the same time, two students at Hamburg's Technical University - Al-Shehhi and Atta - left for Florida.
According to German media, Al-Shehhi, who investigators believe was on the second plane that crashed into the World Trade Center, arrived in Bonn in 1996.
Bild am Sonntag newspaper said Al-Shehhi rented an unsuspecting family's guest room, paying $255 a month, before moving to Hamburg.
Officials in Hamburg have said Atta was part of an Islamic prayer group at the university. Once, the university's chancellor attended a prayer session - apparently to check for radical Islamic content - but said he found nothing to concern him.
Both Al-Shehhi and Atta were born in the United Arab Emirates, according to German investigators.
In the United Arab Emirates, a relative of Al-Shehhi told The Associated Press the young man was the son of a Muslim cleric who died two years ago.
The relative, who spoke on condition of anonymity in Al-Shehhi's hometown of Ras al-Khaimah, said the man was extremely religious, withdrawn and rarely socialized with his peers.
Son of an Egyptian mother and an Emirate clergyman who died two years ago, Al-Shehhi would accompany his father to the mosque at all times, and would make the call to prayer if his father was late.
The relative said Al-Shehhi was dominated by an older half brother, who forced him to get married - a marriage that lasted only two weeks - and ordered him to go to Germany in 1999 to study aviation.
The family declined to talk to The Associated Press.
While in Germany, according to the relative, Al-Shehhi told his family he wasn't coming back to the Emirates, apparently to escape his elder brother. He rarely called home. His mother pleaded with him to return, and she once said that she felt someone was listening to their calls and that her son was being threatened into not coming home.
Originally published September 16, 2001.
