In this series, Newsweek maps the road to 9/11 as it happened 25 years ago, day by day. Yesterday: Marwan al-Shehhi shared his Florida room with Mohammed Atta. They shopped in Target, Circuit City, Payless Shoes, Lowe's.
A motel manager bent the rules for them. August 27, 2001: Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker who would pilot United Airlines Flight 93 (he intended to hit the U.S. Capitol but crashed in Pennsylvania after a revolt by passengers), purchased three Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) aeronautical charts at Banyan Parts Mart and Pilot Shop at 2011 S.
Perimeter Rd, near the Ft. Lauderdale Executive Airport. Jarrah had visited the Oshkosh Pilot Shop in Miami a week earlier and purchased a Boeing 757 cockpit poster and ordered four Garmin GPS III units, which were out of stock.
The store clerk remembered offering to sell him newer models, but Jarrah insisted on the GPS III. The store ordered them for him. Jarrah returned on August 27 to pick up the ordered units.
He also purchased an antenna for his GPS device. The next day, Mohammed Atta was at Office Depot in Coral Springs, reportedly with two Arabic-speaking males, making copies of a fold-out schematic drawing of a Boeing airplane cockpit, evidently the posters Jarrah had earlier obtained. Halfway around the world, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, a supposed nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, applied for a U.S. visa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Known as Ammar Al-Baluchi, he was the main financial go-between with the American hijackers and facilitated their initial travel to the United States. Al-Baluchi arrived in the UAE in 1998, a year after he offered his services to KSM and al Qaeda. There, he worked as a computer programmer by day, handing financial and travel matters for the organization.
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