Ziad Jarrah

Ziad Samir Jarrah (زياد سمير جراح; 11 May 1975 – 11 September 2001) was a Lebanese terrorist hijacker.

He was one of the four hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93, which was crashed into a field in a rural area near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, following a passenger revolt, as part of the 11 September attacks.

Ziad Jarrah was born on 11 May 1975 in Beirut, Lebanon to a wealthy family.

He was brought up in a prominent quarter of the city, Tariq al-Jidida, and received his primary and secondary education from schools in that area.

His father, Samir Jarrah, worked as a social service inspector for the Lebanese government and his mother taught at an elementary school.

His parents were nominally Sunni Muslim, although they lived a secular lifestyle.

In his childhood, he had always wanted to fly planes, but his family discouraged this.

"I stopped him from being a pilot," his father told the Wall Street Journal a week after the attacks.

"I only have one son and I was afraid that he would crash."

He became involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks while attending Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) in the late 1990s, meeting Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, forming what is now known as the Hamburg cell.

From 1995 to 1996, while Jarrah was still living in Yemen, according to his family, somebody of the same name rented an apartment in Brooklyn, New York.

The landlords claimed it was the same Jarrah as in the FBI photographs.

After a wealthy upbringing, Jarrah moved to Germany in 1996.

In the spring of 1996, Jarrah moved to Germany with his cousin, Salim.

They were there to take a certificate course in German at the University of Greifswald, which was required of foreigners studying in Germany who do not speak the language.

While sharing an apartment with his cousin, he reportedly attended discos and beach parties, and his attendance at the mosque fell off.

He met Aysel Şengün, a German-born woman of Turkish ancestry studying dentistry, and the two became good friends.

They dated on and off for the remainder of his life and lived together briefly, which vexed his more religious friends.

In September 1997, Jarrah left Greifswald and instead began studying aerospace engineering at the Fachhochschule (University of Applied Sciences) in Hamburg, while working at a Volkswagen paint shop in nearby Wolfsburg.

While in Hamburg, he rented an apartment from Rosemarie Canel, who would paint a portrait of him that he would bring back as a gift for his mother that December.

The 9/11 Commission Report states that Jarrah was a member of the Hamburg cell, along with Mohamed Atta and the others.

Jarrah was recruited by Osama bin Laden for the attacks in 1999.

Unique among the hijackers, he was close to his family and girlfriend.

He was reportedly the only hijacker who had any significant apprehensions about carrying out the attacks.

His family and friends continue to deny his association with the attacks.

He did not live with any of the others, however, and can be confirmed to have met with any of them in Hamburg only on a single occasion: that of Said Bahaji's wedding at the al-Quds Mosque in October 1999.

In late 1999, Jarrah, Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Said Bahaji, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh decided to travel to Chechnya to fight Russian soldiers in the Second Chechen War.

Khalid al-Masri and Mohamedou Ould Slahi convinced them at the last minute to travel instead to Afghanistan to meet with Osama bin Laden and train for terrorist attacks.

Jarrah was given the (teknonym) ("father of Tariq") likely in honor of Tariq ibn Ziyad, the commander who led the Muslim conquest of Spain.

They were told they were on a highly secret mission and were instructed to return to Germany after the operation and enroll in flight school.

In October 1999, Jarrah was filmed at Said Bahaji's wedding with other 9/11 hijackers, including al-Shehhi.

Jarrah arrived in the United States in June 2000.

He trained at Huffman Aviation together with Atta and Al-Shehhi with their flight instructor Rudi Dekkers from June 2000 to January 2001, after relocating to Florida from New Jersey.

To hide his travels to Afghanistan (which may have concerned security officials at international airports) Jarrah reported his passport stolen in February 2000 and received a blank duplicate, just as hijackers Atta and Shehhi had done the previous month.

Jarrah dropped out of the Fachhochschule and began looking at flight schools.

On 7 September 2001, Jarrah flew from Fort Lauderdale to Newark.

Four days later, he boarded United Airlines Flight 93, and was believed to have taken over as the pilot of the aircraft along with his team of hijackers, which included Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Nami and Ahmed al-Haznawi, who together made an attempt to crash the plane into either the United States Capitol or the White House, which was thwarted when the passengers revolted against the hijackers.

In 2006, a video surfaced showing Jarrah, still bearded, reading his will in January 2000 along with Mohamed Atta.

Not long after this, Jarrah shaved his beard and began to act in a more secular way, according to Şengün.

Many of the future hijackers attempted to hide their radicalism and blend in with the population.