dents in Hamburg, Germany.The new recruits had come to Afghanistan aspir-
ing to wage jihad in Chechnya. But al Qaeda quickly recognized their
potential and enlisted them in its anti-U.S. jihad.
Qaeda members to execute the planes operation, the late 1999 arrival in Kan-
dahar of four aspiring jihadists from Germany suddenly presented a more
attractive alternative. The Hamburg group shared the anti-U.S. fervor of the
other candidates for the operation, but added the enormous advantages of flu-
ency in English and familiarity with life in the West, based on years that each
member of the group had spent living in Germany. Not surprisingly,
Mohamed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah would
all become key players in the 9/11 conspiracy.
Mohamed Atta was born on September 1, 1968, in Kafr el Sheikh, Egypt, to a
middle-class family headed by his father, an attorney. After graduating from
Cairo University with a degree in architectural engineering in 1990, Atta
worked as an urban planner in Cairo for a couple of years. In the fall of 1991,
he asked a German family he had met in Cairo to help him continue his edu-
cation in Germany.They suggested he come to Hamburg and invited him to
live with them there, at least initially.After completing a course in German,Atta
traveled to Germany for the first time in July 1992. He resided briefly in
Stuttgart and then, in the fall of 1992, moved to Hamburg to live with his host
family. After enrolling at the University of Hamburg, he promptly transferred
into the city engineering and planning course at the Technical University of
Hamburg-Harburg, where he would remain registered as a student until the fall
of 1999. He appears to have applied himself fairly seriously to his studies (at least
in comparison to his jihadist friends) and actually received his degree shortly
before traveling to Afghanistan. In school, Atta came across as very intelligent
and reasonably pleasant, with an excellent command of the German language.
increasingly pronounced.According to Binalshibh, as early as 1995 Atta sought
to organize a Muslim student association in Hamburg. In the fall of 1997, he
joined a working group at the Quds mosque in Hamburg, a group designed
to bridge the gap between Muslims and Christians.Atta proved a poor bridge,
however, because of his abrasive and increasingly dogmatic personality. But