BBC 11/23/01: Hijack 'suspects' alive and well

[nationalize the fed]

A man called Waleed Al Shehri says he left the US a year ago

BBC Sunday, 23 September, 2001

Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well.

The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt.

Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September. Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco.

He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports...snip



...FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt....Continued>
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1559151.stm

(Note: An update on this story was published in October 2006 in the BBC News editors' blog)

9/11 conspiracy theory
Friday, 27 October 2006

A five-year-old story from our archive has been the subject of some recent editorial discussion here. The story, written in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was about confusion at the time surrounding the names and identities of some of the hijackers. This confusion was widely reported and was also acknowledged by the FBI.

The story has been cited ever since by some as evidence that the 9/11 attacks were part of a US government conspiracy.

We later reported on the list of hijackers, thereby superseding the earlier report. In the intervening years we have also reported in detail on the investigation into the attacks, the 9/11 commission and its report...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/theeditors/2006/10/911_conspiracy_theory_1.html


The hijack suspects

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has released the photos of the suspected hijackers of the four planes seized on 11 September...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1567815.stm

further reading
http://www.911review.org/Wiki/HijackersAliveAndWell.shtml

[William Seger]

1. "The story has been cited ever since by some as evidence..."

"... that the 9/11 attacks were part of a US government conspiracy."

I would quibble with that statement, in that while I have seen it cited by conspiracists as if it was evidence of something or other, I've never seen any conspiracist actually attempt to present a rational hypothesis or explanation of why they believed it's evidence of a conspiracy. On the one hand, conspiracists claim that the quick identification of the hijackers is suspicious, and yet they turn around and claim that if some of the identifications were wrong, that's suspicious, too -- a fairly common occurrence from people whose "reasoning" works in reverse.

After initial confusion about similar names, there is no evidence that any of the people finally identified as hijackers and shown in that poster is still alive. (In fact, an al Qaeda video titled The Nineteen Martyrs accepts those identifications.) But before going into that long-since discredited claim, how about taking a crack at your own explanation of why you think it matters: Do you take the story "as evidence that the 9/11 attacks were part of a US government conspiracy," and if so, why?