In The United States
On June 12, 2001 Saeed al-Ghamdi applied for and received a second two-year US B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. His application was submitted by a local travel agency and processed through Visa Express, a controversial US visa program in Saudi Arabia which was discontinued the following year.
Arriving in the U.S. on June 27, 2001 with Fayez Banihammad, Saeed shared an apartment with Ahmed al-Nami in Delray Beach, Florida. Oddly, he listed the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida as his permanent address on his driver's license. He was one of 9 hijackers to open a SunTrust bank account with a cash deposit around June 2001. Saeed occasionally trained on simulators at the FlightSafety Aviation School in Vero Beach, Florida together with Mohand al-Shehri and Abdulaziz al-Omari.
According to al-Jazeera reporter Yosri Fouda's documentary Top Secret: The Road to September 11, three weeks prior to the attacks Saeed is believed to have used the name 'Abdul Rahman' to send a message to Ramzi bin al-Shibh (who was posing as a girlfriend) online, in which he wrote
The first semester commences in three weeks. Two high schools and two universities. ... This summer will surely be hot ...19 certificates for private education and four exams. Regards to the professor. Goodbye. This was said to be a reference to two military targets and two civilian, nineteen hijackers, four planes. —August 2001.
On September 7, all four of Flight 93 hijackers flew from Fort Lauderdale to Newark International Airport aboard Spirit Airlines.
Read more about this topic: Saeed Al-Ghamdi
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united and/or states:
“In the United States the whites speak well of the Blacks but think bad about them, whereas the Blacks talk bad and think bad about the whites. Whites fear Blacks, because they have a bad conscience, and Blacks hate whites because they need not have a bad conscience.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“Sean Thornton: I don’t get this. Why do we have to have you along. Back in the states I’d drive up, honk the horn, a gal’d come runnin’ out.
Mary Kate Danaher: Come a runnin’. I’m no woman to be honked at and come a runnin’.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)