2000-2001: 9/11 Hijackers Atta and Alshehhi Attend Florida Mosque

The Congressional Joint Inquiry will later find that several of the hijackers, including Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi, attend mosques in the US and that at least one of the mosques is in Florida. [US Congress, 7/24/2003, pp. 169 ] The Florida mosque attended by Atta and Alshehhi is the Al Hijrah mosque run by Gulshair Shukrijumah in Miramar, Broward County, Florida. Mohamed Atta and several other hijackers live near the mosque (see April 11, 2001) and train at nearby Opa-Locka airport (see December 29-31, 2000). After 9/11, the FBI will visit the mosque and ask Shukrijumah and his wife if they recognize the hijackers and if their son, Adnan, knew Atta or had mentioned trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. [Miami New Times, 4/3/2003; Los Angeles Times, 9/3/2006] Atta is seen with Adnan Shukrijumah, a suspected al-Qaeda operative, in 2001 (see May 2, 2001). His father previously served as an imam at the Al Farouq mosque in Brooklyn. In addition to working as a translator for Sheikh Abdul-Rahman, he also testified as a character witness at the WTC bombing trial for one of the defendants, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, who attended Al Farouq. [FrontPage Magazine, 10/27/2003; Los Angeles Times, 9/3/2006] Gulshair Shukrijumah is receiving money from the Saudi embassy in Washington at this time. [Newsweek, 4/7/2003] In 2009, an FBI informant will claim that he tried to get close to both Atta and Adnan Shukrijumah at the Al Hijrah mosque in early 2001, but the FBI had him work on easier cases instead, because both of them were secretive and wary (see Early 2001). [ABC News, 9/10/2009] The army’s Able Danger data mining program identifies Atta as a member of an al-Qaeda cell centered on Brooklyn. Exactly how it does this is never disclosed, although Atta’s apparent association with Gulshair and Adnan Shukrijumah is one possibile explanation (see January-February 2000).