In this series, Newsweek maps the road to 9/11 as it happened 25 years ago, day by day. Yesterday: The FBI sent around a deeply troubling report on Zacarias Moussaoui after warning the FAA in Minneapolis. The Bureau finally emailed field agents—12 minutes before Flight 11 hit the tower.
September 6, 2001: "Fayez Ahmed" (Fayez Rashid Ahmed Hassan al-Qadi Banihammad), a muscle man who would help hijack United Airlines Flight 175, wired $8,055 on September 6 from his Florida SunTrust account to a Standard Chartered Bank account that belonged to Mustafa al Hawsawi, one of the al Qaeda financial facilitators of the 9/11 operation. Al-Hawsawi was one of two main financial go-betweens with the hijackers, handling mostly the muscle men. Ali Abdul Aziz Ali was the other, handling mostly the Hamburg pilots.
In June 2001, al Hawsawi opened a bank account at the Standard Chartered Bank in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, obtaining an ATM card. The next day, with funds provided by al-Qaeda, he purchased airline tickets for Banihammad and Saeed al Ghamdi to travel from Dubai to Orlando via London. He provided assistance and gave money to other muscle men as they transited the UAE and flew to the United States as well.
Before Banihammad departed the UAE, he was accompanied by Hawsawi when he opened a checking account with a VISA card in the same Standard Chartered Bank branch. Banihammad provided Hawsawi with power of attorney. On September 17, 2000, the three pilots in the United States—Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah—received their largest transfer of money from overseas, $70,000, wired from the United Arab Emirates.
Ali Abdul Aziz Ali used the aliases "Isam Mansur." The transfers were sent from the UAE Exchange Centre located in Bur Dubai, UAE. At the time, the large transfer did not trigger banking suspicious activity reports (SARs). Nor did any of the other transfers of money to the hijackers or the "muscle men" get reported.
The 19 hijackers would use a variety of means—cash they brought into the U.S., foreign and U.S. bank debit and credit cards, foreign checking accounts from European and Gulf state banks, and traveler's checks—to finance their activities inside the U.S. The Hamburg three, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, all continued to maintain and use their bank accounts in Germany, which also helped evade any special attention. On September 8, Mohamed Atta wired $7,860 in two batches, once from a Western Union in a Safeway store and the other from a Giant Supermarket, both in Laurel, Maryland, to "Mustafa Ahmed" (Hawsawi) in the United Arab Emirates and Hawsawi retrieved the funds, using a true name photo identification, at the Wall Street Exchange in Dubai the next day.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
