Outside the Beltway

Mohammed Atta and 9/11 Conspirators Video

James Joyner · Monday, October 2, 2006 · No comments

The Sunday Times of London reported that soundless video of Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 hijackers has been discovered:

FILM of the ringleader of the September 11 hijackers reading his “martyrdom” will inside Afghanistan at Osama Bin Laden’s headquarters has emerged five years after the Al-Qaeda outrage. It is the first time that a videotape has appeared of Mohammed Atta — who flew an American Airlines plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center — at a training camp in Afghanistan. It fills in a significant gap in the timing of the build-up to the attacks on the United States.

Dates on the tape show Atta was filmed on January 18, 2000, together with Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers apparently stormed the flight deck.

The Sunday Times has obtained a copy of the video through a previously tested channel. The tape has no soundtrack and a US source said lip readers had tried without success to decipher what was being said.

Despite the deadly tasks the men had been assigned, they appear in high spirits, laughing and smiling in front of the camera. Only when Atta, with an AK-47 propped on a wall beside him, reads a document marked in Arabic “the will”, does he become solemn. Both are well groomed, without the haggard appearance of the identity mugshots issued after September 11.

The high quality, unedited film shows Bin Laden addressing his followers at the mud-walled complex near Kandahar. One of the main figures in the September 11 plot, Ramzi Binalshibh, is identifiable in the crowd, as is a bodyguard whose task was to kill Bin Laden with two bullets to the head if he faced capture.

Rusty Shackleford has posted the video in five segments and made the code available for posting on other sites. They appear below the fold: