June 2001: Janitor Claims to Witness 9/11 Hijacker inside World Trade Center

Janitor William Rodriguez, who has worked at the World Trade Center for 20 years, believes he sees 9/11 hijacker Mohand Alshehri in one of the towers. Rodriguez is cleaning washrooms on the Trade Center’s concourse level one weekend, when a person he later believes to have been Alshehri approaches him and asks, “[H]ow many public bathrooms are in this area?” Rodriguez says he finds this “very strange.” After 9/11, he will recognize the man from newspaper photos as having been the suspected hijacker. He will say he is “very certain, I’ll give it 90 percent” that the man he’d seen was Alshehri. He will tell the FBI of this encounter, but will never hear back from them. FBI officials later say they have never heard of Rodriguez, but they do not discount his story. [Daily Telegraph, 6/15/2004; MSNBC, 6/15/2004; New York Daily News, 6/15/2004] According to FBI and 9/11 Commission accounts, Alshehri has only recently entered the US, on May 28, 2001 (see April 23-June 29, 2001), though other reports suggest he was in the country several months earlier (see January or July 28, 2001). [US Congress, 9/26/2002; 9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 23 ]