Editor’s note: In collaboration with the hard-hitting Washington, D.C., newsweekly Human Events, WorldNetDaily brings you this special report every Monday. Readers can subscribe to Human Events through WND’s online store.
It could have been the premise for a bad sitcom. Put five al-Qaida members, an alleged serial criminal and an illegal Jordanian immigrant in one small apartment with an illegal alien from El Salvador.
Instead of the script for a television show, this scene, set by Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles records and FBI documents, is a real-life chapter in the still-unfolding saga of Sep. 11.
The picture painted by these documents sheds light on how the hijackers used lax immigration enforcement and DMV loopholes to move undetected across the Eastern Seaboard in the weeks before their terrible crime.
Last Monday, Eyad Alrababah pleaded not guilty in a Virginia federal courthouse to document fraud. He is the newest figure in the story of Sept. 11. His particular tale illustrates that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers moved with ease through a well-established black market that catered to an expansive clientele of illegal aliens, and that stretched at least 300 miles up the East Coast from a Northern Virginia neighborhood near the Pentagon to the suburbs of Connecticut.
Alrababah’s involvement with the terrorists begins in the popular coastal town of Fairfield, Conn. “According to Alrababah,” says an FBI affidavit, “he spent time with several of the suspected hijackers in Virginia and Connecticut but claimed that he had no idea that they were terrorists or were planning to hijack aircraft.”
The Connecticut Post reported that Nawaf Alhazmi, Hani Hanjour, Ahmed Alghamdi and Majed Moqed stayed at the Fairfield Motor Inn for four days in March 2001. The inn’s owner said the FBI had come by in recent weeks and collected “a lot of information.”
An FBI affidavit states that Alrababah, in interviews with investigators, recognized photos of the suspected hijackers.
Hanjour, Moqed and Alhazmi were on board American Airlines Flight 77, which flew out of Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia Sept. 11. Hanjour, it is suspected, piloted the plane into the Pentagon. Alghamdi was on one of the planes that demolished the World Trade Center.
Whether it was during the hijackers’ trip to Fairfield in March or during another Connecticut visit, Alrababah met with the terrorists. What he discussed with them is not yet clear, but one hint may be provided by Alrababah’s alleged line of work. FBI documents state that in early 2000, “Alrababah began to travel back and forth to Virginia to assist Arabic-speaking immigrants from New Jersey and Connecticut who were seeking Virginia identity cards and drivers licenses by fraud.”
Alrababah allegedly had gotten into this business through a mysterious acquaintance in New Jersey. He “stated that in the latter part of 1999 he met a man he knew as Jasser in New Jersey,” says the affidavit. “In February 2000, Jasser took Alrababah to Virginia and helped Alrababah obtain a Virginia identification card.”
The fraud network presumably targeted Virginia because of the state’s lax requirements for proof of identification or proof of residence. Before the state changed its identification-document law on Sept. 21, an applicant for a Virginia ID could “prove” he lived in the state with a form called a DL-51, which required only an address, the signature of the applicant and that of another Virginia resident – or someone such as Jasser, who falsely claimed to be a Virginia resident using his own fraudulently obtained ID card.
When Jasser brought Alrababah to Virginia, the FBI affidavit reads, “Jasser gave him the address of 5913 Leesburg Pike, Falls Church, to use when applying for his identification card.” Soon enough, Alrababah was a “legal” resident of Virginia, and the state listed him as officially living at the Leesburg Pike address.
Using his fraudulently obtained Virginia ID, according to the FBI, Alrababah would take Arabic-speaking illegal and legal immigrants from northern New Jersey down to Virginia so that they could obtain IDs and acquire a gloss of legitimacy. Alrababah had some of his own clients claim to live at the same 5913 Leesburg Pike building that he had falsely claimed as his residence.
Among these clients, said the FBI, was an illegal Jordanian immigrant named Abdel Alfauru, for whom Alrababah falsely signed DMV forms on July 21, 2000. Alfauru has no known ties to the hijackers. But Alrababah’s post-Sept. 11 arrest (he had previously pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor after an Oct. 12, 2000, arrest on similar charges) was for the Alfauru ID.
The 5913 Leesburg Pike address has deeper significance for Sept. 11 than simply being the favorite false residence claimed by one of the hijackers’ acquaintances. That address is a small apartment building abutting a 7-Eleven where the parking lot swarms with immigrants, many illegal, looking for day labor. (It is one block down from the Peking Gourmet Inn, one of the favorite restaurants of both the senior and junior Presidents Bush.)
In early August, according to the FBI, Hanjour and Khalid Almihdhar pulled their van into the parking lot of this 7-Eleven, and one illegal alien from El Salvador, Luis Martinez-Flores, agreed to take them to the DMV at the Springfield Mall.
At the mall’s DMV Express, Martinez-Flores signed the requisite forms and got the two men Virginia ID cards. In doing so, he claimed that both he and the terrorists lived at 5913 Leesburg Pike, #8. In subsequent days, according to the FBI, Hanjour and Almihdhar used the same address to fraudulently secure Virginia IDs for Moqed and Salem Alhazmi (both on Flight 77) and Ziad Jarrah, the presumed pilot of United Flight 93 that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
FBI documents state that Martinez-Flores lived in that Leesburg Pike apartment at one point. But residents say he lived elsewhere in the same housing development. It is not believed that any of the hijackers actually lived there, despite their representations to the Virginia DMV.
Nonetheless, the common use of this address for document fraud suggests there may be a tie between Martinez-Flores and Alrababah, or at least Martinez-Flores and Jasser. Also, both Martinez-Flores and Alrababah had liaisons with Hanjour.
Nawaf Alhazmi was the only suspected Flight 77 hijacker for whom the FBI reported no Virginia DMV records. But the car the five hijackers parked at Dulles Airport on Sept. 11 was rented in Alhazmi’s name.
In that car investigators found a note with the name “Mohumed” and a Northern Virginia phone number. The phone belonged to Somali immigrant and Reagan National Airport worker Mohamed Abdi, whom the FBI arrested in September for forging checks. Investigators are still trying to figure out what Abdi’s number was doing in Alhazmi’s car. (Abdi claimed he did not know Alhazmi and had no idea why Alhazmi would have his phone number.) Investigators believe, however, that one clue may lie in the report that Alhazmi had also been in Fairfield with Alrababah.
Martinez-Flores is now in jail for document fraud, serving an 18-month sentence that will be followed by his deportation. Abdi pleaded guilty to an unrelated charge of forging checks.
Government investigators say they expect to learn more about the nature of these still-tenuous connections if Alrababah becomes more cooperative with them in order to avoid a harsh prosecution.
The investigators also want to know who “Jasser” is, and why he claimed the same Falls Church address that Martinez-Flores provided to the hijackers. But this much is already clear: The road to Sept. 11 runs up and down Interstate 95, through a black market network that may have been set up to facilitate illegal immigration by Latin Americans, but that paved the way for Muslim terrorists from the Middle East to kill thousands of Americans.
Previous stories:
Hijackers’ helper to get slap on wrist
Suburban Washington’s terror trail
Subscribe to Human Events.
Brace yourself for Election Day
Patrice Lewis